[ 



THE BEACON BIOGRAPHIES 

EDITED BY 

M. A. DeWOLFE HOWE 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

BY 

FRANK B. SANBORN 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

BY 

FRANK B. SANBORN 




BOSTON 

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 
MDCCCCI 



Copyright, May, ipoi 
By Small, Maynard £ff Company 

{Incorporated} 

Entered at Stationers' Hall 



THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Copies Receded 

JUN. 28 1901 

Copyright entry 
/'btASsA-'XXo. No, 
COPY B, 



G«r£* H. Ellis, Boston, U.S.J. 



The frontispiece to this volume is from u 
sketch made by Bowse, the crayon artist, in 
1858, preliminary to his finished crayon 
of that year. It was preferred by Mrs. 
Emerson to the finished picture, but the 
original is now lost. The photograph from 
which this engraving is taken was made in 
the summer of 1858. Only three prints 
were made, one of which was sent to Her- 
mann Grimm in Germany. The present 
engraving is by Messrs. John Andrew & 
Son, Boston. 



PEEFACE. 



Such facts in this book as were not drawn 
from the papers and the memory of the 
author are mostly taken from three princi- 
pal sources of information about Emerson's 
life — his Correspondence with Carlyle, 
edited by C. E. Norton, his authorised 
biography by J. E. Cabot, and his son's 
later memoir, 6 'Emerson in Concord." 
All three are works of great value — for one 
thing, because they contain so many pages 
of Emerson's own words, which are always 
the best ivhere they can be used. But some- 
thing has been drawn, also, from my 
u Memoir of Bronson Alcott," and from 
papers of Alcott, Channing, Thoreau, and 
other friends of Emerson, to which I have 
had access. In quoting from Emerson 1 s own 
volumes (chiefly from u Nature" and the 
u Poems") I have not always followed the 
exact order of the passages, thinking to 
make the point clearer, sometimes, by a 
slight variation. So many are the biogra- 



viii PEEFACE 
phies, critiques, and original writings of 
Emerson that in a work so brief the diffi- 
culty was to exclude and pass by. My 
effort has been to present the salient and 
the less observed features of a character per- 
fectly simple, yet so far above the common 
attention of mankind that the strangest 
opinions have been current, at one time and 
another ', concerning his aims and methods. ' 
If this little volume supplies any defect in 
past criticism or adds any touch to the 
portrait of one whom I early, gradually, 
and intimately knew, it will have achieved 
its purpose. 

F. B. S. 

Concord, April 4, 1901. 



CHEONOLOGY. 
1803 

May 25. Ealph Waldo Emerson born in 
Boston, Massachusetts. 

1813-17 
At the Boston Latin School. 

1817 

August Enters Harvard College, " Presi- 
dent's Freshman " of Dr. Kirkland. 

1821 

Is class poet, graduates, and teaches in 
his brother William's school, Boston. 

1822 

Autumn. In Boston teaching. 

1824 

April. In Eoxbury ; writes u Good-bye, 
Proud World." 

1825 

February. At Cambridge, studying di- 
vinity. 



x CHEONOLOGY 
1826 

October 10. Approbated to preach by the 
Middlesex ministers. 

October 26. Preaches his first sermon in 
his uncle Eipley's pulpit. 
November 25. Sails for Carolina in quest 
of health. 

1827 

January-June. Preaches in Southern 
cities and returns to Boston. 
September and October. Preaches at 
Northampton and New Bedford, Mass. 
1828 

July 3. Takes his brother Edward to the 
McLean Asylum, insane. 
December 6. Takes his recovered brother 
to Concord, N.H. Preaches there. 
December 17. Becomes betrothed to Miss 
Ellen Tucker at Concord. 

1829 

March 11. Colleague of Eev. Henry 
Ware, Jr., Hanover Street, Boston. 
September 29. Marries Miss Tucker, and 
settles in Chardon Place. 



CHEONOLOGY xi 
1830-31 

Preaches constantly in Boston. Illness 
and death of Mrs. Emerson. 

1832 

June. Eeligious doubts. Proposes to give 
up the rite of communion. 
September 9. Preaches a farewell sermon 
in Hanover Street. 

December 25. Ill and sad ? sails for Sicily. 
1833 

February-May. In Italy and France ; 

meets Landor and Lafayette. 

August. Visits Carlyle at Craigenputtock 

and Wordsworth at Eydal. 

October 9. Eeaches New York. 

November 4. Lectures at Masonic Temple 

in Boston on Natural History. 

1834 

January. Still lecturing in Boston. 
May 14. Begins a forty-year correspond- 
ence with Carlyle. 

October 1. His brother Edward dies in 
Porto Eico, 



xii CHEONOLOGY 
1834 {continued) 
October 20. Eetires to live in the Old 
Manse at Concord. 

1835 

January and February. Biographical lect- 
ures in Boston. 

July. Buys his Concord home on the 
Lexington Eoad. 

September 12. Delivers the Bi- centennial 
Address at Concord. 

September 14. Marries Miss Lidian Jack- 
son at Plymouth. 

1836 

January-May. Finishes Nature, his first 
book. 

May 9. Charles Emerson dies at Staten 
Island. 

July. Assists in reprinting Carlyle's 
Sartor Eesartus. 

September. Helps to form Transcendental 
Club. 

October. Birth of his son "Waldo Emerson. 



CHKONOLOGY xiii 
1837 

August 31. Phi Beta Kappa oration at 
Cambridge. 

November. First speech on American Sla- 
very (at Concord). 

December 6. Begins ten lectures on 
"Human Culture'' at Boston. 

1838 

March 12. First address on War, before 
the Peace Society, Boston. 
July 15. Gives the famous Divinity 
School Address at Cambridge. 
December 5. Begins ten lectures on 
"Human Life" at Boston. 

1839 

January - July. Beprinting Carlyle' s 
books and sending him money. 
December 4. Begins ten lectures on "The 
Present Age ?? in Boston. 

1840 

January 15. Dedicates a church at Lex- 
ington. 



xiv CHKONOLOGY 

1840 (continued) 
May 29. Begins correspondence with. 
John Sterling. 

July 1. Writes introduction to the Dial. 
October-December. Editing the first series 
of Essays. 

1841 

January. Publication of the first Essays. 
April 25. Thoreau goes to live with Em- 
erson for two years. 

August 11. Oration at Waterville Col- 
lege. 

December 2. Begins eight lectures on 
" The Times " at Boston. 

1842 

January 27. Death of his son Waldo 
Emerson. 

October 1. Describes in the Dial Alcott's 
English experiences. 

1843 

January and February. Lectures in New 

York and Philadelphia. 

June. Visits Alcott at Fruitlands. 



CHBONOLOGY xv 



1843 {continued) 
July 4. Gives his first Temperance Ad- 
dress, at Harvard, Mass. 

1844 

February 7. Lectures to merchants' 
clerks in Boston on "The Young 
American. " 

August 1. Gives in Concord his " Ad- 
dress on Emancipation." 
December 20. Publishes the second Essays. 

1845 

July 22. Gives a discourse at Middle- 
bury, Vt. ; on "The Scholar/' when the 
college chaplain prayed against "the 
nonsense of Transcendentalism." 
December 11. Begins seven lectures at 
Boston on " Eepresentative Men." 
July-December. Visits Thoreau often in 
his Walden cabin. 

1846 | 
October. Arranges his poems for publi- 
cation in a volume. 



xvi CHEONOLOGY 
1846 {continued) 
November. Invited to England by Alex- 
ander Ireland to give lectures. 

1847 

January. Publishes an American and an 

English edition of Poems. 

March 2. Invited by Carlyle to England, 

and to lecture in London. 

October 5. Sails for England. 

1848 

January-February. Lectures in England 
and Scotland. 

March-April. In London and Oxford. 

May. In Paris. 

June. Lectures in London. 

July 15. Sails for America. 

November. Votes for Van Buren and 

Adams at the national election. 

1849 

January and February. Helps to form 
Town and Country Club in Boston. 
July. Edits his fifth book. Nature; Ad- 
dresses and Lectures. 



CHBONOLOGY xvii 

1849 (continued) 
September. Nature reprinted. 
October and November. Edits Representa- 
tive Men. 

1850 

January. Publishes Representative Men. 
February. Lectures through the "West. 
July 20. Shipwreck of Margaret Fuller, 
near New York. 

November. Votes the Free Soil ticket at 
the State election. 

1851 

January. Joins in the opposition to 
Daniel Webster for his ic treachery.' 7 
March 21. Beads his Conduct of Life in 
six lectures at Pittsburg. 
June. Contributes to Memoir of Mar- 
garet Fuller. 

1852 

March. Gives Sunday lectures at Ply- 
mouth, Mass., in a course with Thoreau 
and others. 

May 11. Address to Louis Kossuth at 
the Concord battle-ground. 



xviii CHEONOLOGY 



1852 (continued) 
November. Votes against Hawthorne's 
friend, General Pierce, for President. 

1853 

January 10. Lectures at Springfield, 111. 
February. "Writing on English Traits. 
October. The manuscript of Country 
Walking ) joint work with Ellery Chan- 
ning, prepared, but never finished. 
November. Emerson's mother dies at his 
home. 

1854 

January and February. Lecturing in 
Philadelphia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. 
March 7. Denounces Fugitive Slave Law. 
August 15. Gives an address at Williams 
College. 

December. Invites F. B. Sanborn to take 
charge of his children as pupils. 

1855 

January 25. Gives a long anti-slavery 
address in Boston. 

March and later. Preparing English Traits 
for publication. 



CHEOlsTOLOGY xix 

1855 (continued) 
September 20. Addresses the Women's 
Eights Convention, Boston. 
August. Eeads and praises Whitman's 
"Leaves of Grass." 

1856 

January. Publishes English Traits. 
May 26. Speaks in Concord on "The 
Assault on Charles Sumner." 
September 10. Speaks at the Kansas re- 
lief meeting in Cambridge. 
November 4. Votes for Fremont for Pres- 
ident. Death of Samuel Hoar. 
November 5. Writes the eulogy of Mr. 
Hoar. 

1857 

January and February. Lecturing in 
Ohio, Illinois, etc. 

March. Entertains John Brown, of Kan- 
sas, in Concord. 

April. Conferring with Lowell, E. H. 
Dana, etc., on the Atlantic Monthly. 
July 4. Writes the Ode for the town cel- 
ebration in Concord. 



xx CHEONOLOGY 

1857 (continued) 
December. Gives a new lecture, " Coun- 
try Life," at Concord. 

1858 

March 3. Begins six philosophical lect- 
ures in Boston. 

April and later. Dines monthly with the 
Saturday Club in Boston. 
December. Lecturing in the West. 

1859 

January 25. Speech in Boston at the 
Burns Centenary. 

March and April. Six lectures in Boston 
on " Manners and Art." 
May 7. Hears John Brown in Concord 
Town Hall. 

May 22. Lectures for Theodore Parker 
(absent) in Music Hall. 
December 2. Takes part in funeral ser- 
vice for Brown, his day of death. 

1860 

March 8. Lecturing in Canada. 



CHKONOLOGY xxi 

1860 (continued) 
June 17. Memorial address on Theodore 
Parker in Boston. 

1861 

January 24. Mobbed at the Tremont 
Temple in Boston with Garrison. 
April and May. Six lectures in Boston — 
the last on " Boston. 7 ' 
July 10. Address to the students of 
Tufts College on War. 
September. His son Edward enters Har- 
vard College. 

November 12. Lectures on u American 
Nationality " in Boston. 

1862 

January 29. Visits Charles Sumner at 
Washington. Lectures there on u Amer- 
ican Civilisation' 7 in presence of Abra- 
I ham Lincoln. 

Spring and summer. Addresses Parker's 
congregation in Boston. 
May 8. Gives the funeral eulogy of 
Thoreau in the Concord church. 



xxii OHEONOLOGY 

1862 (continued) 
October 12. Upholds Lincoln's Emanci- 
pation Proclamation in Boston. 

1863 

January 1. Celebrates Emancipation with 

the u Boston Hymn" at Boston. 

May 1. Death of Mary Moody Emerson 

at Williamsburg, N.Y. 

July 22. Second address at Dartmouth 

College. 

August 11. Second address at Water- 
ville, Me. 

December 1. Lectures in the Parker Fra- 
ternity Course, Boston. 

1864 

April 23. Shakespeare Tercentenary at 
the Saturday Club. 

May 23. Attends Hawthorne's funeral in 
the Concord church. 

October 8. Visits J. M. Forbes at the 
island Naushon with Goldwin Smith. 
November 27. Begins a course of six lect- 
ures at the Parker Fraternity on u Social 
Aims." 



CHEOJSTOLOGY xxiii 
1865 

January and February. Lecturing at the 
West. 

April 19. Gives the funeral eulogy of 
Abraham Lincoln at Concord. 
July 21. Speech at the Harvard Com- 
memoration of Dead Graduates. 
July 31. Second address at Williams 
College. 

Autumn. Writing the poem " Ter- 
minus. " 

October. Marriage of his daughter Edith 
Emerson and William Forbes. 

1866 

April 14. Begins six lectures in Boston 
on "Intellect." 

December. Prepares the second book of 
poems. May Day, for printing. 

1867 

January-March. Lecturing in Illinois and 
Wisconsin. 

April 19. Dedicates the Soldiers' Monu- 
ment at Concord. 



xxiv CHBONOLOGY 
1867 {continued) 
May 1. Publishes May Bay. 
May 30. Addresses the Free Beligious 
Association at Boston. 
July. Second Phi Beta oration at Cam- 
bridge. 

1868 

January and February. Lecturing. 
September 13. Death of his brother Will- 
iam Emerson at Concord. 
October 12. Begins six lectures at 
Boston. 

1869 

January 2. Begins ten weekly readings 

of poetry and prose at Boston. 

March 1. Beads a sketch of Mary Moody 

Emerson at the New England Woman 7 s 

Club. 

April and May. Three discourses on 
"Beligion" in Boston. 

1870 

April 16. Begins a course of sixteen 
weekly lectures at Harvard — " Natural 
History of the Intellect." 



CHBONOLOGY xxv 

1870 {continued) 
June. Publishes Society and Solitude. 
December 22-23. Speeches in New York 
before the New England Society. 

1871 

February 3. Speech at the organisation 
of the Art Museum, Boston. 
April-May. Journey to California with 
Mr. Forbes and his daughter Edith. 
August 15. Speech on Walter Scott at 
Massachusetts Historical Society. 
November 20. Sets out for lectures at 
Chicago and elsewhere. 

1872 

January. Lectures at Baltimore and 
Howard University, Washington. 
April 15. Begins six readings of prose 
and poetry at Boston. 
July. Address at Amherst College. 
July 24. Emerson's house at Concord 
partly burned. 

August and September. Besides at the Old 
Manse. 



xxvi CHKONOLOGY 
1872 {continued) 
October 28. Sails for England with his 
daughter Ellen. 

November 7. Visits Carlyle at Chelsea. 
December 28. In Egypt, by way of Paris, 
Florence, and Naples. 

1873 

February 19. Sails from Alexandria for 
Messina and Naples. 

April. Speaks for the last time in Eng- 
land at the Workingmen's College. 
May. Is welcomed home by the Concord 
people in procession. 
October 1. Address at the opening of the 
Concord Public Library (Charles Sumner 
present). 

December 16. Eeads the poem " Boston " 
at the celebration of the Tea Party of 
December 16, 1773. 

1874 

January. Edits Parnassus, a collection of 
poems. 



CHEONOLOGY xxvii 
1875 

April 19. Speaks at the Centenary of 
Concord Fight. 

September and October. Edits Letters and 
Social Aims, with the aid of Mr. Cabot. 

1876 

June 28. Addresses the students of Vir- 
ginia at Charlottesville. 
November 8. Addresses the Boston Latin 
School. 

1877 

April 20. Beads his Boston lecture at 
the Old South Church. 

1878 

March 30. Beads a lecture, " Fortune of 
the Eepublic/' at the Old South. 
July and August. Attends the Conversa- 
tions of Mr. Alcott and Dr. Jones in 
Concord, preliminaries of the School of 
Philosophy. 

1879 

May 5. Second address to the students 
of Divinity Hall, Cambridge. 



xxviii CHBONOLOGY 
1879 (continued) 
July 4. Beads the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence in the Concord Town Hall. 
July 12. Attends the opening of the 
School of Philosophy. 
August 2. Gives his lecture on " Mem- 
ory " before the school. 

1880 

August 2. Lectures on " Aristocracy " 
before the School of Philosophy in the 
Town Hall. 

1881 

February 10. Beads a paper on Car- 
lyle at the Massachusetts Historical 
Society. 

1882 

March 21. Attends the Centenary of the 

Concord Social Circle. 

March 26. At Longfellow's funeral in 

Cambridge. 

April 27. Balph Waldo Emerson dies at 
Concord. 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



L 

I ha ye desired to write the life of 
Emerson, my guide, philosopher, and . 
friend for more than thirty years of his 
public career, and in private my inti- 
mate acquaintance from 1854 till his 
death in 1882. Not that his biography 
is lacking, for many and able persons 
have written it in several languages; 
but, with all the varied excellence of 
these books, they still make on me the 
impression which Cotton Mather said the 
sketches of Oliver Cromwell gave him — 
a feeling that the principal spring of 
the Puritan Caesar's character was ever 
defectively perceived and related. Is it 
not so with Emerson ? That which most 
surprised me first in his genius and his 
character is what still surprises — his 
wondrous versatility, and the presence 
of his subtile and sincere thought in every 
pathway of the human intellect. As in 



2 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
the Concord woods, after a snow-fall, the 
early woodsman or lingering poet finds 
in every forest avenue traces of another 
before him, man or animal, so, when 
every region of human experience ex- 
cept the slums is visited, we find the 
marks, sturdy or delicate, that Emerson 
was there before us. No writer known 
to me save Shakespeare — not even 
Homer or Goethe — has this inimitable 
mark of versatile mind. With the deli- 
cacy of Virgil and the oracular grace of 
Simonides, Emerson has also the plain 
sense of Montaigne and the lofty elo- 
quence of Bacon. And in his character 
as a man there was found a high human 
quality, displayed in his friendships and 
hospitalities, which makes the ordinary 
terms of social intercourse — " gentle- 
man/' " scholar, " "man of the world " — 
seem trivial, frequent as they are in the 
mouths of the frivolous. Sanctity and 
humour ; visions of the mystic and a 
common sense like that of Socrates and 



EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 3 
Franklin ; — between these extremes, 
and with a thousand saliences in every 
direction accessible to man, lay this 
broad, smiling, friendly intelligence ; not 
without its periods of slumber and in- 
action, but essentially and quantitatively 
there for influence through a lifetime of 
almost fourscore years. 

Whence came these rare qualities in 
this still rarer combination ? The indus- 
try of an English genealogist has at last 
searched out the village in eastern Eng- 
land whence Thomas Emerson, with two 
clerical sons and a family 'scutcheon, 
in proof of gentility, emigrated to 
Ipswich in Massachusetts about 1635, — 
soon after the clerical ancestors of 
our Emerson in another line — the 
Bulkeleys, of Odell, or Woodill, in Bed- 
fordshire — came over to Cambridge, and 
settled in Concord. Peter Bulkeley, the 
the founder and first minister of Concord, 
was the son of Dr. Edward Bulkeley, of 
the same small parish. Both were Cam- 



4 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
bridge scholars in England, descended 
from a noble Cheshire family. The 
Emersons seem to have sprung from a 
gentle family in Durham ; and by an in- 
termarriage with the Waldos from whom 
came his middle name, our Emerson was 
descended (traditionally) from one of 
the famous persecuted Waldenses of 
southern Europe. Hence the scholarly 
and religious bent of the Emerson mind 
in later generations, accompanied, as 
in Waldo Emerson's father, Eev. William 
Emerson, of Harvard and Boston, by 
graceful manners and a turn for eloquence 
and levity. By another intermarriage, 
the Concord sage was descended from 
a clerical Moody family of Maine, in 
which eccentricity sometimes amounted 
to insanity ; while from his mother, Euth 
Haskins of Boston, he inherited his 
physique and fashion of features, "more 
Haskins than Emerson. ?? Thus mixed 
and intertwined, the evolution of cen- 
turies working in this ancestry gave 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 5 
Emerson at last as the product. He was 
one of eight children, of whom only five 
reached man's estate — William, Waldo, 
Edward, Eobert Eulkeley (an " inno- 
cent ") and Charles. Waldo, born in 
Boston, May 25, 1803, ontlived them all, 
and died in Concord, April 27, 1882. 

The domestic story of this household 
was like that of many clerical families in 
New England. The father, a fashionable 
and popular Boston pastor, dying in 
1811, when Waldo was eight years old 
and the youngest child but two, the 
family income was too small to educate 
the boys for the pulpit and the bar. 
But the household was kept together. An 
aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, of devout 
and brilliant intellect, assisted in the 
care and education of her nephews, four 
of whom graduated at Harvard, as their 
forefathers had, in 1818, 1821, 1824, and 
1828, the latest being Charles, who 
was specially Waldo's companion in 
his maturer years, but died in 1836. 



6 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 
An honourable and respected poverty 
escorted the family through the years of 
education. They were united in affec- 
tion, and not estranged by a diversity of 
talent. Waldo, at school and college, 
was rated the least brilliant of the four, 
and seemed to have the fewest advan- 
tages ; for William studied a while in 
Germany, and as a youth called on 
Goethe at Weimar ; Edward was a law 
student with Daniel Webster, and 
Charles had the benefit of his brothers' 
wide acquaintance, besides the attractive- 
ness of his own genius and manners. 
After the death of Edward and Charles, 
Waldo Emerson, at the age of thirty-five, 
wrote their pathetic u Dirge, " in which 
he said : — 

"I touch this flower of silken leaf, 
Which once our childhood knew ; 
Its soft leaves wound me with a grief 
Whose balsam never grew. 

" But they are gone, — the holy ones 
Who trod with me this lovely vale ) 



EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 7 

The strong, star-bright companions 
Are silent, low and pale. 

" You cannot unlock your hearty — 
The key is gone with them ; 
The silent organ loudest chants 
The master's requiem.'' 

For Edward he wrote later that poem 
in another key — the ode on the dead 
at Concord Bridge, and for the brother 
with whom he had lived in the Old 
Manse near by : — 1 

"To these their penalty belonged : 
I grudge not these their bed of 
death, 

But thine to thee, who never wronged 

The poorest that drew breath. 
Thine from youth the leader's look 
Gave the law which others took ; 
And never poor beseeching glance 
Shamed that sculptured counte- 
nance. 7 ' 

Family affection, the companionship 
of equals in mind, a generous pride, and 
a chivalrous regard for those less fortu- 
nate—these, if anything, are the testi- 



8 EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 
monials of long and unblemished descent. 
Beside them wealth and rank and the 
homage of the world are trifles. They 
mark the inheritance which Emerson 
received, admitting him where genius 
may have but a brief recognition, and 
where the higher duties of life are best and 
most gallantly performed. To this were 
added a fitting education and discipline. 

Entering Harvard College at the age 
of fourteen, he graduated in 1821, hav- 
ing enjoyed while there the income of 
an old foundation given in the early 
years of the college for the support of poor 
scholars — the same which Thoreau after- 
wards received while at Harvard, sixteen 
years later. His preparation for college 
had been in Boston, particularly in the 
Latin School, where in 1813, at the age 
of eleven, he had made a brief version 
from Virgil, which was the earliest of 
his poems that has been published. It 
appears in Miss Elizabeth Hoar's Life of 
Mrs. Sarah Eipley, who, as Miss Brad- 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 9 
ford, was a special friend of Emerson's 
aunt Mary, and herself a good Latin and 
Greek scholar. Her letter to the nephew 
of her friend shows how early he began 
to think himself a poet, and to acquire 
that taste for the Greek authors which 
afterwards manifested itself in his admi- 
ration of Plato. She wrote : — 

"My dear young friend, you love to 
trifle in rhyme now and then ; why will 
you not continue this versification of the 
Fifth Bucolic? You will answer two 
ends, or, as the old proverb goes, kill 
two birds with one stone — improve in 
your Latin as well as indulge a taste for 
poetry. Why can't you write me a 
letter in Latin? But Greek is your 
favorite language ; Epistola in lingua 
Grceca would be still better. All the 
honor will be on my part — to corre- 
spond with a young gentleman in Greek. 
Write me with what stories in Virgil 
you are most delighted. Is not that a 
charming one of Msus and Euryalus? 



10 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
I suppose you have a Euryalus among 
your companions — or don't little boys 
love each other as they did in Virgil's 
time ? How beautifully he describes the 
morning ! Do write to your affectionate 
friend Sarah." 

Thus challenged, the lad turned to his 
Eclogues, and beginning with 

Sed tu desine plura puer ; sucessimus antro } 

he thus rhymed on in the measure of 
Dryden : — 

"Turn now, O youth! from your long 

speech away ; 
The bower we've reached recluse from 

sunny ray. 
The nymphs with pomp have mourned 

for Daphnis dead ; 
The hazels witnessed and the rivers 

fled. 

The wretched mother clasped her 

lifeless child, 
And gods and stars invoked with 

accents wild. 
Daphnis ! The cows are not now led 

to streams 



EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 11 

Where tlie bright sun upon the water 
gleams, 

Neither do herds the cooling river 
drink, 

Nor crop the grass upon the verdant 
brink. " 

Sufficient proof that his ear was even 
then pleased with the u English hexame- 
ter," and his hand master of its easily 
placed accents ; but in original verse at 
that time (as shown by his " History of 
Fortus, a Chivalric Poem ' ? ) he mingled 
the longer line with Scott's octaves, of 
which he continued fond through life. 

His Euryalus was then William Henry 
Furness, afterwards the author and 
clergyman at Philadelphia ; for neither 
in boyhood nor throughout life was he 
averse to love. His daily occupations, 
perhaps at the house on Beacon Street, 
where the Congregational Building now 
stands, were described by himself in 
April, 1813, while writing to his aunt 
Mary at Waterford, in Maine, where she 
was visiting her own aunts : — 



12 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 

"Friday, April 9, I choose for the day 
of telling what I did. In the morning I 
rose, as I commonly do, about five 
minutes before six. I then helped 
William [his brother] in making the 
fire, after which I set the table for 
Prayers. I then called mamma, about 
a quarter after six. We spell as we did 
before you went away. I confess I often 
feel 

6 An angry passion start 
In one corner of my heart ? 

when one of my brothers gets above me, 
which I think sometimes they do by 
unfair means, — after which we eat our 
breakfast. Then I have from about 
quarter after seven till eight to play or 
read. I think I am rather inclined to the 
former. I then go to school, where I hope 
I can say I study more than I did a little 
while ago. I am in another book, called 
Yirgil, and our class are even with 
another which came to the Latin School 
one year before us. After attending this 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 13 
school I go to Mr. Webb's private school, 
where I write and cipher. I go to this 
place at eleven, and stay till one o'clock. 
After this, when I come home, I eat my 
dinner, and at two o'clock I resume my 
studies in the Latin School, where I do 
the same except in studying grammar. 
After I come home I do mamma her 
little errands if she has any ; then I 
bring in my wood to supply the break- 
fast room. I then have some time to 
play and eat my supper. After that we 
say our hymns or chapters, and then 
take our turns in reading Eollin, as we 
did before you went. We retire to bed 
at different times. I go at a little after 
8, and retire to my private devotions, 
and then close my eyes in sleep, and 
there ends the toil of the day." 

Among his mother' s 6 6 little errands, ' ' 
at some time in his boyhood, was driving 
the family cow to pasture, — not on the 
Common, where John Hancock had 
pastured his cows, but beyond it, where 



14 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
the Providence Station used to be, and 
where his uncle Haskins had a paddock. 
And among the family at his mother's 
was for some years Lemuel Shaw, after- 
wards the renowned chief justice — him- 
self the son of a country parson at West 
Barnstable. So simply, and with such 
duties of devotion, study and work, did 
the future sage prepare himself for his 
great career in life. Mrs. Eipley has 
told me how, at the death of his only 
surviving sister, Mary Caroline, in 1814, 
at the age of three, young Ealph, then 
eleven, conducted the family worship 
the next morning, and how she admired 
the grave and sweet composure with 
which he read the Scripture and prayed. 
It must have reminded his aunt Mary, 
who was present, of her own grand- 
mother, Phebe Walker, wife of Eev. 
Daniel Bliss, of Concord — " a woman/' 
she says, "such as I have read about, 
but, except her, never seen. She never 
fell before affliction. My mother re- 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 15 
proached her with want of feeling 
because she went to church whilst her 
husband lay dead in the house (1764). 
But she was rapt in another world. " So 
was her great-grandson in his childhood 
and youth ; and his meditations on 
divine things, as his ancestor, Peter 
Bulkeley said, "did, indeed, breed an 
holy serenity. " 

Emerson, who, under other names, 
was often reciting his own experiences, 
has a passage in his "Domestic Life" 
which describes the family life of his 
boyhood and youth, presenting "the 
eager, blushing boys discharging as they 
can their household chores, and hasten- 
ing into the sitting-room to the study of 
to-morrow's merciless lesson," and por- 
traying their delights: — 

"The warm sympathy with which 
they kindle each other in school-yard, or 
barn, or woodshed, with scraps of poetry 
or song, with phrases of the last oration 
or mimicry of the orator ; the youthful 



16 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
criticism of the sermons on Sunday ; the 
school declamation, faithfully rehearsed 
at home ; the first solitary joys of literary 
vanity, when the translation or the 
theme has been completed, sitting alone, 
near the top of the house. . . . What is 
the hoop that holds them so stanch ? It 
is the iron band of poverty, of necessity, 
of austerity, which, excluding them from 
the sensual enjoyments that make other 
boys too early old, has directed their 
activity into safe and right channels, 
and made them, despite of themselves, 
reverers of the grand, the beautiful, and 
the good. The angels that dwell with 
them, and are weaving laurels of life for 
their youthful brows, are Toil and Want, 
and Truth and Mutual Faith.' ? 

In college Emerson won no laurels, 
though he took a few prizes. He was 
backward in mathematics, cared little 
for Paley, and was already occupied, as 
he said long afterwards, writing every 
night in his chamber "my first thoughts 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 17 
on morals and the beautiful laws of com- 
pensation and of individual genius, — 
which to observe and illustrate have 
given sweetness to many years of my 
life." He wrote verses, and was rather 
noted for the quiet elegance of his prose, 
at a period when soaring rhetoric was 
the fashion of the young, and was not 
disagreeable to Emerson himself, if set 
off by good declamation. Already he 
was beginning to realise what his aunt 
Mary called " the wild and fruitless wish 
that you could be disunited from travel- 
ling with the souls of other men." 
Originality was stirring within him, 
though checked, as commonly it is, by 
the course of education, and the swarm- 
ing illusions which talent and genius, 
beauty and grace, in others, throw about 
a youth of warm fancy. He had taken 
to school-teaching while in college and 
soon afterwards — more as a bread-winner 
than from any love for that work ; and, 
when his brother William went to 



18 EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 
Gottingen for two years to study divinity, 
Waldo succeeded to his Boston school for 
young ladies, in which he was uncom- 
fortable, though admired. In writing 
to some of his former pupils long after, 
Emerson said : — 

" I was nineteen ; had grown up with- 
out sisters, and, in my solitary and 
secluded way of living, had no acquaint- 
ance with girls. I still recall my terrors 
at entering the school ; my timidities in 
French, the infirmities of my cheek, and 
my occasional admiration of some of my 
pupils ; and the vexation of spirit when 
the will of the pupils was a little too 
strong for the will of the teacher." 

This was perhaps his first lesson in 
that school of society and sex which he 
afterwards delineated so well in his poetic 
fragment on 6 ' Manners ' ? : — 

" Grace, Beauty, and Caprice 
Build this golden portal ; 
Graceful women, chosen men, 
Dazzle every mortal. 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 19 

Their sweet and lofty countenance 

His enchanted food ; 

He need not go to them, their forms 

Beset his solitude. 

Little and less he says to them, 

So dances his heart in his breast ; 

Their tranquil mien bereaveth him 

Of wit, of words, of rest. 

Too weak to win, too fond to shun 

The tyrants of his doom, 

The much-deceived Endymion 

Slips behind a tomb." 

Love, indeed, was no stranger to this 
susceptible heart ; and none of the poets 
has better defined its potent and insin- 
uating forms. Not even Dante and 
Shakespeare see more clearly into its 
nature and mysteries, from the instinc- 
tive affections of the child to the rapture 
of the highest saint. 

Having gone through his studies in 
divinity, under the ostensible guidance 
of Dr. Channing, and with a more tech-* 
nical instruction from Professor Andrews 
Norton, and the pastoral illustrations 



20 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
given by his grandfather, Dr. Eipley of 
Concord, for whom he occasionally 
preached, he was " approbated " to 
preach by the Middlesex Association of 
Congregational Ministers, in which his 
grandfather Eipley and his uncle, Eev. 
Samuel Eipley of Waltham, were influ- 
ential members ; though, as he told me 
a dozen years before his death, "if they 
had examined me strictly perhaps they 
would not have let me preach at all.'' 
Hardly had he delivered his first ser- 
mons, at "Waltham and Concord, when 
his health, always delicate at that age, 
compelled him to go southward ; and in 
November, 1826, he sailed for Charles- 
ton, South Carolina, and thence pro- 
ceeded to Florida, then but newly 
brought under United States authority. 
During his six months' absence he 
preached at St. Augustine, Charleston, 
Washington, Philadelphia, and New 
York ; but his chief acquisitions during 
the journey (since health did not return 



\ 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 21 
to him easily) were the acquaintance of 
Achille Murat, nephew of Napoleon, 
and a personal observation of slavery 
in the South. One other piece of 
knowledge he gained, as he once told 
me — that fleas exist and will abide 
with the most scrupulous Bostonians, in 
warm latitudes. In Florida, to his great 
chagrin, he found himself flea-bitten, 
and concealed the humiliating fact, for 
he had never known before that this 
unpleasant insect attacked the well-bred. 
But soon he discovered that everybody 
in St. Augustine and Tallahassee had 
fleas. Even Prince Murat himself, on 
his way to visit his uncle the ex- King 
of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte at Borden- 
town, was not ashamed to admit that he 
carried fleas. It was a new and consol- 
ing discovery, which gave him much 
ease of mind when he visited Sicily, 
Naples, and Eome in 1833. 

Plainly, the pitfalls of theology dis- 
concerted him as he began to teach it in 



22 EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 
the Arian fashion, from Unitarian pulpits 
in city and country. His letters to his 
best confidante, his aunt Mary, as well 
as to his brother William, disclose nascent 
opinions at variance with the creed he 
was expected to hold. William had 
returned from Germany, years before, 
unable from scruples of conscience to 
preach the divinity he had been study- 
ing at Cambridge and Gottingen. Per- 
plexed in Germany, as his own dissent 
became clear to him, he visited Goethe, 
in company with his friend George 
Calvert, of the Baltimore family, and 
ventured to ask that old pagan's advice 
about entering the pulpit with doctrinal 
unbelief in his heart. To his surprise, 
the courtly poet and free-thinker told 
him he ought to put his scruples aside 
and follow the profession of his clerical 
forefathers. William Emerson could 
not. To the great grief of his mother, 
an old-fashioned Christian of Boston, 
he gave up divinity and studied law, 



EALPH WALDO EMBESON 23 
which he long practised honourably in 
New York, and was one of Waldo 
Emerson's hearers when the younger 
brother sermonised and lectured there. 
Waldo had perhaps a more religious 
nature than William, and saw how he 
could serve God without believing every- 
thing that Deacon Jarvis and Deacon 
Hubbard confessed in the Concord meet- 
ing-house. But intimations came early 
of his doubts and aspirations. Writing 
to Mary Moody Emerson in August, 
1826, her nephew said : — 

' 6 In the Fall I propose to be approbated, 
to have the privilege, though not at pres- 
ent the purpose, of preaching, but at 
intervals. I do not now find in me any 
objections to this step. 7 Tis a queer 
life, and the only humor proper to it 
seems quiet astonishment. Others laugh, 
weep, sell or proselyte j I admire. 
There are in each man's history insignifi- 
cant passages which he feels to be, to him, 
not insignificant ; little coincidences in 



24 EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 
little things, which touch all the springs 
of wonder, and startle the sleeper, Con- 
science, in the deepest cell. The mind 
stands forth in alarm, with all her facul- 
ties suspicious of a Presence which it 
behooves her deeply to respect ; touched 
not more with awe than with curiosity, 
if perhaps some secret revelation is not 
about to be vouchsafed, or doubtful if 
some moral epoch is not just now fulfilled 
in its history — and the tocsin just now 
struck that severs and tolls out an ir- 
reparable past. ... In the wind of great 
events I am to assume my office — the 
meek ambassador of the Highest. Can 
you not suggest the secret oracles which 
such a commission needs? the lofty 
truths that are keys and indexes to all 
other truth, and to all action on society ? 
Whatever Heaven has given me or with- 
held, my feelings, or the expression of 
them, is very cold, my understanding 
and my tongue slow and unaffecting. 
It may be each excitement from within 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 25 
may impel a swifter circulation in the 
outer channels of manner and power. " 

Here is a true disclosure of the faith 
of the mystic, but a mystic called upon 
to address listeners who may never have 
dreamed of the inward revelation which 
Calvinism, with all its horrors, gave 
reason to expect, under the title of 
u regeneration. " A year later he is 
more explicit as to the impossible 
creeds : — 

"I conceive that the dissolution of 
the body will have a wonderful effect on 
the opinions of all creed-mongers. How 
the flimsy sophistries that have covered 
nations — unclean cobwebs that have 
reached their long, dangling threads 
over whole ages, issuing from the dark 
bowels of Athanasius and Calvin — will 
spring to nothing at that sunburst of 
truth, — and nobody will be more glad 
than Athanasius and Calvin ! In my 
frigidest moments, when I put behind 
me the subtler evidences, and set Chris- 



26 EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 
tianity in the light of a piece of human 
history — much as Confucius or Solyman 
may regard it. I believe myself im- 
mortal. For otherwise all things look 
so silly : the sun is silly, and the con- 
nection of beings and worlds such mad 
nonsense. I say this. I say that in 
pure reason I believe my immortality 
— because I have read and heard often 
that the doctrine hangs wholly on 
Christianity." 

Here was the beginning of the heresy 
that developed five years later, and sug- 
gested to Emerson that he leave the 
pulpit. But while in it he will try to be 
himself, and not conceal his originality 
under a mask of conformity. Later in 
1827 (August 17) he writes again to 
this effect : — 

"I preach half of every Sunday. 
When I attended church on the other 
half of a Sunday, and the image in the 
pulpit was all of clay, and not of tunable 
metal, I said to myself : ' If men would 



EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 27 
avoid that general language and general 
manner in which they strive to hide all 
that is peculiar, and would say only 
what was uppermost in their own minds, 
after their own individual manner — 
every man would be interesting. Every 
man is a new creation, can do something 
best; has some intellectual modes and 
forms, or a character the general result 
of all, such as no other agent in the uni- 
verse has. If he would exhibit that, it 
must needs be engaging — must be a 
curious study to every inquisitive mind. 
But a man of narrow intellect is afraid or 
ashamed of himself, and all his communi- 
cations to men are unskilful plagiarisms 
from the common stock of thought and 
knowledge ; and he is, of course, flat and 
tiresome.' " 

Here is a text upon which all Emerson's 
public utterances were the commentary. 
He spoke from himself and for himself. 
His matter was new in part ; and, when 
not so, his plagiarisms from the common 



28 EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 
stock were skilful, and he gave his own 
impress to them. Consequently, he 
became an interesting and attractive 
preacher — a fact of which there is ample 
evidence. 

But, as Dante says in his Vita Nuova, it 
was now whispered to the youth of 
twenty-four, " Behold! a spirit cometh 
mightier than thou, who shalt rule over 
thee," — (Ecce Deusfortior me, quiveniens 
dominabitur mihi) ; and in December, 
1827, Emerson fell seriously in love. It 
was at what he calls "New Concord " ; 
that is, the capital of New Hampshire, 
which, in honour of the fight in "Old 
Concord " (where Emerson's grandfather 
figured as musketeer, chaplain, and his- 
torian), had changed its name from 
Eumford to Concord. There a Unita- 
rian church had been gathering in 1827, 
and to its members Emerson preached in 
December. At the house of Colonel 
Kent, who had married Mrs. Tucker, a 
Boston widow with a beautiful daughter, 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 29 
he met then for the first time Ellen 
Tucker, sixteen years old. Writing to 
William to announce his engagement 
(December 24, 1828), Emerson says : — 
" It is now just a year since I became 
acquainted with Ellen at Colonel Kent's 
house ; but I thought I had got over my 
blushes and my wishes when I now de- 
termined to go into that dangerous neigh- 
borhood on Edward's account. But the 
presumptuous man was overthrown by 
the eyes and the ear, and surrendered at 
discretion. He is now as happy as it is 
safe in life to be. She is seventeen years 
old, and very beautiful by universal con- 
sent. ' ' 

She had been no less impressed than 
he at their first meeting, and the woo- 
ing was a short one. A Concord (New 
Hampshire) citizen wrote, some years 
before Emerson's death, "Our older cit- 
izens remember the frank and ingenuous 
manner in which it is said Mr. Emerson 
announced the fact of his engagement at 



30 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
his boarding-house, in the presence of 
the gentle Dr. [John] Farmer, who, 
after listening in a most interested man- 
ner, gave utterance to the exuberance of 
his feelings by saying, 'Let us join in 
singing,— 

1 Blest are the sons of peace, 

Whose hearts and hopes are one, 
Whose kind designs to serve and please 
Through all their actions run. ? " 

They were married in September, 
1829, and went to live in Chardon Place 
(now Street) near Bowdoin Square, then 
a fashionable part of Boston, where Em- 
erson, in the meantime, had been chosen 
colleague of Eev. Henry Ware at the 
old church of the Mathers in Hanover 
Street, being ordained there in March, 
1829. He was soon made chaplain of 
the State Senate, also, and a member of 
the Boston School Board, and so became 
a public official in several conspicuous 
ways. Of his forebodings just before his 
ordination, we learn something which 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 31 
illustrates his character by another letter 
to his Sibylline aunt, January 6 : — 

"You know — none can know better 
— on what straitened lines we have all 
walked up to manhood. In poverty and 
many troubles the seeds of our prosperity 
were sown. Now all these troubles ap- 
peared a fair counterbalance to the flat- 
teries of Fortune. I lean always to that 
ancient superstition ( drawn from a wise 
survey of human affairs ) which taught 
men to beware of unmixed prosperity ; 
for Nemesis kept watch to overthrow the 
high. Well, now look at the altered as- 
pect. William has begun to live by the 
law. Edward has recovered his reason 
and his health. Bulkeley was never 
more comfortable in his life. Charles is 
prospering in all ways. Waldo is com- 
paratively well and comparatively suc- 
cessful — far more so than his friends, 
out of his family, anticipated. Now I 
add to all this felicity a particular felic- 
ity which makes my own glass very much 



32 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
larger and fuller ; and I straightway say, 
'Can all this hold!' Will God make 
me an exception to the common order 
of his dealings, which equalize destinies? 
I should be glad, dear aunt, if you, who 
are my oldest friend, would give me 
some of your meditations upon these new 
leaves of my fortune. You have always 
promised me success ; and now, when it 
seems to be coming, I direct to you this 
letter, which I enter as a sort of protest 
against my Ahriinan." 

This is a striking and significant utter- 
ance ; and the foreboding was soon veri- 
fied. The frail health of his wife changed 
to mortal disease ; his brother Edward 
again became an invalid, and was com- 
pelled to live in Porto Eico, where he 
died without returning ; and Charles 
joined him there for a like reason of in- 
validism. Ellen Tucker Emerson died 
in 1831. From scruples of conscience 
about administering the rite of commun- 
ion, the young pastor gave up his parish 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 33 
the next year ; and by December 25, 
1832, when he sailed for Sicily in a fruit 
vessel of a parishioner, all the good fort- 
une was gone, of which he had feared 
the Nemesis. Here, then, ended what 
Goethe calls the Apprenticeship of the 
future Master : his Lehrjahre, or school 
years, are over ; Destiny has taken him 
by the hand, reluctant and sorrowful, 
and led him forth upon his Wanderjahre, 
or journeyman's tour of duty. It was a 
short journey, this first visit to Europe, 
and made in the unusual way of en- 
trance, — from Malta and Syracuse, by 
Catania, Taormina, and Messina, to Na- 
ples, Eome, and Florence, and thence to 
Switzerland and France. But England 
and Scotland were his goal ; and there he 
found Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Car- 
lyle, as he had found Landor in his villa 
between Florence and Fiesole. Before 
turning that serious page of his life, let 
us see what Emerson had become ere 
the age of thirty ; for he had not reached 



34 EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 
his thirtieth birthday when he sailed out 
of Boston Bay at Christmas, 1832. 

The foundations of learning had been 
securely laid, and the power of solitary 
thinking was fully developed ; but his 
acquaintance with other languages than 
English, in the best authors, was but 
slight. He read Latin easily, but only 
a few books ; Greek and French with 
some difficulty, Italian a little, and Ger- 
man not at all. Gradually, as his slowly 
opening intellect turned its power of 
penetration and comparison on his own 
written style, he changed the exuberant 
rhetoric of Boston in his youth into some- 
thing like the sententiousness of his later 
essays, but without their clearness. He 
had seen more of the narrow American 
world of 1830 than most men of his 
years — the grand tour in Europe was 
then seldom made in youth 5 had heard 
the great orators, Webster and Clay, 
Channing, Everett, and Harrison Gray 
Otis ; and had formed, by native incli- 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 35 
nation and practice, his own peculiar 
oratory. His natural sweetness of 
temper and real humility were accom- 
panied by a certain proud bearing, in- 
herited, we may fancy ; for in his jour- 
nal he wrote : — 

"My grandfather William, walking 
before his father to church on a Sunday, 
his father checked him : i William, you 
walk as if the earth was not good enough 
for you/ <I did not know it, sir,' he 
replied with the utmost humility. This 
is one of the household anecdotes in 
which I have found a relationship/' 
- His religious opinions inclined to those 
of the Society of Friends ; and he said, 
after leaving his Boston pulpit, which 
he did without stir or scandal and with 
the affection of his parishioners: "I 
believe I am more of a Quaker than any- 
thing else. I believe in the still small 
voice ; and that voice is Christ within 
us." Thus fortified by a simple belief, 
independent of ritual, he confronted the 



36 EALPH WALDO EMEESOK 
ecclesiastical institutions of Europe with- 
out yielding to their attractions or feeling 
impelled to crusade against them. His 
attraction was ever to persons more than 
to institutions ; and few were better fitted 
than he, when meeting Landor, Carlyle, 
and "Wordsworth, to see their eminence 
without being drawn from his own orig- 
inality. 



( Emerson's few years in the pulpit had 
hardly more than introduced him to a 
public career — so few were his places 
of preaching, and so small the audiences 
which he commonly addressed. The 
Unitarians were a small sect, even in 
New England, though locally strong in 
eastern Massachusetts and southern New 
Hampshire. This fact may have had its 
influence in determining him to leave the 
pulpit and make for himself a wider 
opportunity of imparting what he was 
sent into the world to teach. ) His visit 
abroad in 1833, undertaken primarily 
for renewed health, had also for object 
to settle some doubts — not of what he 
should think and say, but how he should 
best say it — and to see for himself what 
Goethe and Coleridge, Carlyle and 
Wordsworth, could tell him in person. 
Goethe had died, but the others he saw ; 
and why he did so was explained to 



38 EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 
his young Edinburgh friend, Alexander 
Ireland, before meeting them : — 

"Am I, who have hung over their 
works in my chamber at home, not to 
see these men in the flesh, and thank 
them, and interchange some thoughts 
with them, when I am passing their 
very doors 1" 

Having spent a day and night with 
Carlyle, "amid the desolate heathery 
hills where the lonely scholar nursed 
his mighty heart, " he wrote to Mr. 
Ireland his immediate impressions of the 
man, then so little known to the world 
or even to his own Scotch compa- 
triots : — 

" I found him one of the most simple 
arid frank of men, and became ac- 
quainted with him at once. We 
walked over several miles of hills, and 
talked upon all the great questions 
that interest us most. The comfort of 
meeting a man of genius is that he 
speaks sincerely. He feels himself to 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 39 
be so rich that he is above the meanness ^ 
of pretending to knowledge which he 
has not. He is the most catholic of 
philosophers. He forgives and loves 
everybody, and wishes each to struggle 
on in his own place, and arrive at his 
own ends. But his respect for eminent 
men, or rather his scale of eminence, is 
about the reverse of the popular scale. 
My own feeling was that I had met with 
men of far less power who had got 
greater insight into religious truth." 

It was the younger Carlyle, Emerson 
was thus describing, and harsher traits 
appeared in later years ; but the de- 
scription would well fit Emerson him- 
self in many traits. Unlike as the two 
reformers of history and ethics were, 
they met on the common ground of 
genius and sincerity ; and it was this 
first interview which cemented their 
long friendship, and thus became im- 
portant for both and for the world in 
after days. No such alliance of modern 



/ 



40 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
men of genius can be compared with 
it, except that between Goethe and 
Schiller ; but Emerson resembled Goethe 
more than Carlyle represented Schiller. 
Proceeding to England, Emerson saw 
Wilberforce buried in London, with 
Wellington present at the great funeral. 
He had visited Coleridge, and heard 
him denounce Unitarianism, before 
going to Scotland ; and he called on 
Wordsworth at Eydal Mount, on his 
way back to London. He found the 
poet "a plain, elderly, white-haired 
man, not prepossessing, and disfigured 
by green goggles. He led me out into 
his grounds, where, he said, many thou- 
sands of his lines were composed, and re- 
peated to me three beautiful sonnets 
which he had just finished upon the oc- 
casion of his recent visit to Fingal's Cave 
at Staffa. He was so benevolently anx- 
ious to impress upon me my social duties 
as an American citizen that he accom- 
panied me near a mile from his house, 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 41 
talking vehemently, and ever and anon 
stopping short to impress his words. 
He thinks that the intellectual tuition 
of society is going on out of all propor- 
tion faster than its moral training — 
which last is essential to all educa- 
tion." 

That Emerson was a little amused by 
this visit is very evident. There was 
always something to smile at in the 
good Wordsworth, upon whom in 
1856 Emerson passed this general 
judgment, when relating more fully 
his interview in English Traits : — 

"He honored himself by his simple 
adherence to truth, and was very will- 
ing not to shine ; but he surprised by 
the hard limits of his thought. He 
made the impression of a narrow and 
very English mind ; of one who paid 
for his rare elevation by general tame- 
ness and conformity. Off his own beat 
his opinions were of no value." 

Of Landor, with whom Emerson 



42 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
dined and breakfasted in Italy, lie had 
a higher opinion as man, if not as poet, 
though noting in him, too, the English 
limitations and eccentricities : — 

"I found him noble and courteous, 
living in a cloud of pictures at his Villa 
Gherardesca, a fine house commanding 
a beautiful landscape. I had magnified 
from some anecdotes an impression of 
Achillean wrath — an untamable petu- 
lance. But, certainly, on this May day 
his courtesy veiled that haughty mind ; 
and he was the most patient and gentle 
of hosts. To be sure, he is decided in 
his opinions, likes to surprise, and is 
well content to impress, if possible, 
his English whim on the immutable 
past. He carries to its height the love 
of freak which the English delight 
to indulge, as if to signalize their com- 
manding freedom. He has a wonder- 
ful brain, despotic, violent, and inex- 
haustible, meant for a soldier, by 
chance converted to letters, in which 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 43 
there is not a style nor a tint not 
known to him ; yet with an English 
appetite for action and heroes. Landor 
is strangely undervalued in England; 
but year after year the scholar must 
still go back to him for a multitude of 
elegant sentences, for wisdom, wit, and 
indignation that are unforgetable." 

These passages are. cited because it 
was one part of Emerson's mission in 
life to appreciate the best of contem- 
porary authors before the great world 
did so. Landor, Carlyle, Charles Eeade, 
and Matthew Arnold are cases in 
point, not to mention Alcott, Thoreau, 
and Ellery Channing, William Alling- 
ham, and David Wasson. He had in 
fuller measure what he ascribes to his 
aunt Mary, "the fatal gift of pene- 
tration" ; and it was exercised upon 
those about him, as well as on the 
world's literature. But of travelling, 
even to see famous men, he soon had 
enough. Eeturned to America, and 



44 EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 
to Concord, where he lived for a time 
in the Old Manse, with his mother 
and grandfather, he made this entry 
in his journal : — 

"I am very glad my travelling is 
done. A man not old feels himself 
too old to be 'a vagabond. The people 
at their work — the people whose vo- 
cations I interrupt by my letters of 
introduction — accuse me by their looks 
for leaving my business to hinder 
theirs. " 

Kor was the public work to which 
Emerson had dedicated himself in 1834 
light or insignificant. Writing his 
first letter to Carlyle in May of that 
year, he said, what Americans have 
been repeating, each in his own form- 
ula, of late: "In the last six years 
government in the United States has 
been fast becoming a job, like great 
charities. A most unfit person in the 
Presidency has been doing the worst 
things ; the worse he grew, the more 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 45 
popular. Now things seem to mend ; 
yet men dare not hope that the majority 
shall be suddenly unseated. " To this 
condition of things — not quite so bad 
as a Bostonian brought up in the 
straitest sect of the Federalists and 
Webster Whigs must needs imagine — 
were added in New England a sec- 
tarian, controversial religious dead- 
ness, akin to that of England in the 
eighteenth century ; and social condi- 
tions more and more afflicting to those 
who, like Emerson, Carlyle, and Dr. 
Channing, had much at heart the up- 
lifting of the multitude, or, like Alcott 
and Horace Mann and Henry Barnard, 
felt keenly the defects of public educa- 
tion. Emerson, who seldom gave a 
counsel to others which he had not 
tested in his own experience, was al- 
ready long since telling himself what 
in the same letter he declares he wished 
to say to Carlyle : — 

" Deeply should I grieve at his fall, if, 



46 EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 
in that exposed England, where genius 
always hears the devil's whisper, — 6 All 
these kingdoms will I give thee/ — his 
virtue also should be an initial growth, 
put off with age. Drawn by strong 
regard to one of my teachers, I went to 
see his person at Craigenputtock. I 
went to your house only to say, i Faint 
not ! the word you utter is heard, 
though in the ends of the earth, and by 
humblest men ; it works, prevails.' ?? 

In the same spirit Emerson entered in 
his journal at this period (November 15, 
1834 : " Henceforth I design not to utter 
any speech, poem, or book that is not 
entirely and peculiarly my work. I will 
say at public lectures and elsewhere 
those things which I have meditated for 
their own sake, and not for the first 
time with a view to that occasion. " 
From this too stringent rule he after- 
wards departed, as every person " en- 
dowed with the mystery of natural 
eloquence ? ' (as he said of Dr. Channing) 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 47 
must do. Indeed, he once told me that 
he looked back with wonder on a winter 
in Boston, when he lectured every week 
for ten weeks, and wrote each lecture 
in the week intervened since the former 
one. 

Although, he still continued to speak 
from Unitarian or other pulpits, until 
1840 or thereabout, when specially in- 
vited, Emerson considered from 1833 
onward that his special business was 
lecturing ; and no man did more to 
authenticate and build up that system of 
"Lyceum" lectures which grew so 
rapidly and spread so extensively from 
New England into the West and South 
from 1830 to 1860. In one of these 
ancient "lyceums," at Concord, he gave 
more than a hundred lectures (some of 
them repetitions, of course) ; and at 
others he habitually spoke every year — 
notably at Salem, where at one time 
Hawthorne was the " curator' 7 and in- 
viter. What were the financial pros- 



48 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 

pects of courses of lectures at Boston, in 
1834-35, may be seen by Emerson's letter 
to Carlyle, April 30, 1835. He had read 
there the winter before his biographical 
lectures on Burke, George Fox, Luther, 
Michelangelo, and Milton, u the fee to the 
lecturer inconsiderable, usually twenty 
dollars for each lecture. " But courses 
of lectures were better paid, Spurzheim, 
the tall German phrenologist, having got 
probably three thousand dollars in "the 
few months that he lived in Boston, " 
where, in fact, he died. Professor Silli- 
man of Yale got even more for a course 
of fifteen or sixteen lectures on the then 
new science of geology. Even parlour 
lectures had begun, and Dana, the poet, 
was giving a course on English literature, 
at ten dollars for each lady who joined 
the class ; so was Dr. Charles Follen 
on German literature. While urging 
Carlyle to come to America, abide f with 
him at Concord, and lecture in Boston 
and Salem, Emerson tells him that his 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 49 
hall (probably the Masonic Temple on 
Tremont Street) will hold twelve hun- 
dred persons, but he must not expect 
more than nine hundred; such will 
pay from three to four dollars for a 
single ticket to a course, " a gentleman 
and lady ? ? paying five dollars for the two. 
The hall cost but twelve dollars a lecture ; 
and, supposing nine hundred tickets sold 
at three dollars, the net proceeds for a 
course of ten might be two thousand five 
hundred dollars. If they succeeded in 
Boston, they could be given also at Salem, 
perhaps at Cambridge, and u probably 
at Philadelphia, thirty-six hours dis- 
tant. " "At New York anything lit- 
erary has hitherto had no favor." 
Meantime a lecturer could travel for 
four to four and a half dollars a day, 
board in Boston in "gigmanic" style 
(at the Tremont House, " probably the 
best hotel in North America") for eight 
dollars a week ; sixteen dollars would 
" provide a gentleman and lady' 7 



50 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
(should Jane Carlyle accompany her 
spouse) "with, board, chamber, and 
private parlor at a fashionable boarding- 
house/' It was in this way that young 
Wendell Phillips was about this time 
travelling with ladies to Philadelphia, 
and boarding with the romantic but 
reprehensible English Trelawny, Shel- 
ley's friend, at such a pension in that 
Quaker city. In country places the 
expenses were two-thirds less. Ellis 
Gray Loring authorised Emerson to in- 
vite the Carlyles to spend a couple of 
months at his Boston house ( u I assured 
him I was too selfish for that"), and 
offered to subscribe with others to guar- 
antee the frugal Scot his success, "if 
our people cannot find out his worth. ?? 
It was also proposed that, "if Mr. 
Carlyle would undertake a Journal, of 
which we have talked much, but never 
yet produced, he would do us great ser- 
vice, and we feel some confidence that it 
could be made to secure him a support. 77 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 51 
Here was the first hint of the Dial and 
the Atlantic Monthly, which both took 
shape in the minds of Emerson and his 
small circle before they ventured into 
what Lucretius calls Mas luminis or as, — 
the regions of celestial day. In 1834 it 
was to be called the Transeendentalist 
or the Spiritual Inquirer, and the Eev. 
F. H. Hedge was to edit it, in the absence 
of Carlyle; but this, and Carlyle's own 
writings, were sure of some opposition, 
which Emerson clearly explained : — 

" Andrews Norton, one of our best 
heads, once a theological professor, and 
a destroying critic, lives upon a rich 
estate at Cambridge, and frigidly ex- 
cludes your 6 Diderot ? paper from a 
i Select Journal ' edited by him — with 
the remark, 1 Another paper of the Teu- 
felsdrockh School.' The University, 
perhaps, and much that is conservative 
in literature and religion, will give you 
its cordial opposition. Nor yet do I feel 
quite certain of this. If we get a good 



52 EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 
tide with us, we shall sweep away the 
whole inertia — which is the whole force 
of these gentlemen, except Norton. If 
you have any friendly relations to your 
native church, fail not to bring a letter 
from a Scottish Oalvinist to a Calvinist 
here, and your fortune is made. But 
that is too good to happen. " 

Well did Emerson foresee the hostility 
of his university at Cambridge, and of 
him whom Carlyle afterwards termed 
"your hard-headed Unitarian Pope," 
to the Transcendentalists and their 
friends over sea. The public support 
given by Emerson to his friend Alcott in 
his famous Temple School, and his Con- 
versations with Children on the Gospels 
(which appeared in 1837, soon after 
Emerson's first little book, Nature, and 
through the same publisher), did not pre- 
vent him from being invited to give the 
Phi Beta oration before the Harvard 
society in the following summer. But 
from that time (August 31, 1837) for 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 53 
thirty years, and till after the great Civil 
War had swept away "the whole in- 
ertia " of Cambridge and Boston, Emer- 
son received no honours from his Alma 
Mater, and was not again invited to ad- 
dress her learned societies. His invita- 
tion to give the Divinity School Address 
came from a few young theologs, just 
going forth into the world from the 
small college near Andrews Norton's 
"rich estate, " but who did not par- 
take either of his force or inertia. 
When I entered Harvard College in 
1852, just midway of this thirty years' 
war against the heretics and reformers, 
the readers of Emerson were but a feeble 
minority in the four hundred students 
who then gathered there, and the Faculty 
of some thirty members had but half a 
dozen of the Emersonian school among 
them. When the Cambridge and Boston 
"tempest in a wash-bowl, " as Emer- 
son called the outcry against his Divinity 
School Address of 1838, was at its height, 



54 EALPH WALDO EMEESOST 
lie saw that it would affect unfavour- 
ably his friend Carlyle' s success in New 
England, and wrote to him (October 
17,1838): — 

"At this moment I would not have 
you here on any account. The publica- 
tion of my Address has been the occasion 
of an outcry in all our leading local 
newspapers against my i infidelity, pan- 
theism, and atheism. 7 The writers warn 
all and sundry against me, and against 
whatever is supposed to be related to my 
connection of opinion ; against Tran- 
scendentalism, Goethe and Carlyle. I am 
heartily sorry to see this last aspect ; for, 
as Carlyle is nowise guilty, and has un- 
popularities of his own, I do not wish to 
embroil him in my parish difficulties. 
Just now, in Boston, where I am known 
as your editor, I fear you lose by the 
association. So I am happy, as I could 
not have thought, that you have not 
yielded yourself to my entreaties. Let 
us wait a little, till this foolish clamor 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSOST 55 
is overblown. If I live, my neighbors 
must look for a great many more shocks, 
and perhaps harder to bear." 

Carlyle, who, with all his dyspeptic 
pinings and grumblings, had yet a man's 
heart in his stomach-region, took the 
matter as his friend could have wished, 
and said the wash-bowl might storm it- 
self out. a As to my share in it, grieve 
not for half an instant. Pantheism, Pot- 
theism, Mydoxy, Thydoxy, are nothing 
at all to me ; a weariness the whole jar- 
gon, which I avoid speaking of, decline 
listening to. As to you, my friend, you 
are even to go on, giving still harder 
shocks if need be ; and should I come 
into censure by means of you, there or 
here, think that I am proud of my com- 
pany ; that as the boy Hazlitt said after 
hearing Coleridge, ' I will go with that 
man/ or as our wild Burns has it, — 

' Wi 7 sic as he, where'er he be, 
May I be saved or damned.' " 



56 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 

Such was indeed the sentiment of the 
attached group of hearers, mostly young 
persons, and quite likely to be women, 
who then gathered about Emerson, 
wherever he might speak, but chiefly in 
Boston, Concord, and Plymouth. It was 
in the last-named town, the oldest in 
New England, that he first met Miss 
Jackson, the lady whom he married in 
1835, and to whom Mrs. Carlyle sent as 
a friendly present the engraving from 
Guido's " Aurora, " of the Eospigliosi 
Palace in Eome, " whose horses are as a 
morning cloud, 77 which has ever since 
hung in a parlour at t^e home in Concord. 
It was this, and not the original painting, 
which Thoreau never saw — for he de- 
clined Hecker's proposal that they 
should make the pilgrimage to Eome, 
and salute the Pope together — that 
suggested to the poet-naturalist his 
unfamiliar lines on this u Aurora " : — 

" Castles and cities by the sounding 
main 

Eesound with all the busy hum of life ; 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 57 

The fisherman unfurls his sails again, 
And the recruited warrior bides the 
strife. 

The early breeze ruffles the poplar 
leaves ; 

The curling waves reflect the unseen 
light; 

The slumbering sea with the day's im- 
pulse heaves, 

While o'er the western hill retires the 
drowsy night." 

This animosity towards Emerson was 
aroused merely by his uttered opinions ; 
for no man seems ever to have borne 
him personal hostility. But how sharp 
the odium theologicum could be, even 
among the mild Unitarians of Boston's 
most respectable streets, is seen by debates 
in the Boston Association in 1838, as 
reported by Theodore Parker, then a 
young pastor at West Eoxbury, and by 
no means yet the heretic that he after- 
wards became, being, as Lowell wrote in 
his Fable for Critics, "So (ultra) cinian 
he shocked the Socinians : " 



58 EALPH WALDO EMEESON" 

"Was Emerson a Christian? Dr. 
Greenwood of King's Chapel said he 
was not. John Pierpont maintained he 
was an atheist — a downright atheist. 
But nobody doubted he was a virtuops 
and devout man ; one who would enter 
heaven when they were shut out. Of 
course they were in a queer predicament. 
Either they must acknowledge a man 
may be virtuous, and yet no Christian 
(which most of them thought it a great 
heresy to suppose), and religious, yet an 
atheist — which is a contradiction, — or 
else affirm that Emerson was neither 
virtuous nor religious — which they could 
not prove. Dr. Frothingham (a succes- 
sor in Eev. "William Emerson's pulpit) 
and Dr. James Walker thought he should 
be called a Christian, if he desired the 
name. It is quite evident there are now 
two parties among the Unitarians : one 
is for progress, the other says, 1 Our 
strength is to sit still. ? Dr. Channing 
is the real head of the first party ; the 



EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 59 
other has no head. The oyster, which 
never moves, has none and needs none." 

Dr. Channing drew nearer and nearer 
to the position on social questions which 
Emerson and his friends were assuming ; 
but, theologically, he remained as he had 
begun, a mild Arian, but much more 
tolerant than either Arius or Athanasius. 
Channing died in 1842 ; and from that 
time Parker and Emerson's schoolmate, 
W. H. Furness of Philadelphia, may be 
said to have divided the headship of the 
progressive Unitarians. Emerson stood 
apart from that controversy, though out- 
spoken when needful on its topics ; but 
in the mean time he had joined in the 
anti-slavery movement, which made him 
obnoxious to many who would not have 
heeded his theologic heresies. It was 
this more than the Address of 1838 
which cut him off from the sympathies 
of Harvard, and finally secured him the 
honour of being mobbed in Cambridge 
and Boston, as Garrison and Phillips had 



60 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
been much earlier. The earliest of his 
political papers seems to have been a 
letter to President Van Buren in 1838, 
protesting against injustice from which 
the Indians were suffering ; but in the 
same year, while lecturing at Boston, he 
declared himself against the murderers 
of "the brave Lovejoy" at Alton, 
Illinois, killed as he was defending his 
printing-office against a pro-slavery mob. 
It was this same outrage which first 
brought "Wendell Phillips upon the anti- 
slavery platform at Faneuil Hall, where 
he found himself in accord with Dr. 
Channing and Hallett, who afterwards 
distinguished himself as a Boston slave- 
catcher. In the Class Day poem of 
J. E. Lowell, then under suspension from 
Harvard College for a slight offence 
against college etiquette, and residing at 
Concord, where he saw much of Emerson, 
there is a passage of censure for the 
abolitionists, Transcendentalists, and 
Sartor-Eesartists, which reads oddly in 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSOST 61 
view of Lowell's after-life and admiration 
for the Concord authors. The attack on 
Emerson was meant to be specially- 
severe : — 

u Woe for Beligion, too, when men who 
claim 

To place a 'Keverend' before their 
name 

Ascend the Lord's own holy place to 
preach 

In strains that Kneeland had been 

proud to reach ; 
And which, if measured by Judge 

Thacher's scale, 
Had doomed their author to the county 

jail ! 

Alas that Christian ministers should 
dare 

To preach the views of Gibbon and 
Voltaire ! 

Alas that one whose life and gentle 
ways 

E'en hate could find it in its heart to 
praise, 

Whose intellect is equalled but by few, 
Should strive for what he'd weep to 
find were true ! ' ' 



62 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 

These last lines were particularly 
pointed at his hospitable entertainer in 
the eastern end of Concord Village, 
Lowell himself lodging with the parish 
minister near the western end, and per- 
haps taking his meridian in theology, 
of which he then knew little, from Mr. 
Frost, who could not overlook Emerson's 
absence from the parish meeting-house. 
The elder poet generously did overlook 
in the younger those sallies of wit and 
follies of youth which Lowell himself 
quickly saw reason to regret. He never 
reprinted the ^verses, and must have 
shuddered in after years as he read that 
worse than Wordsworthian line, i 6 Whose 
intellect is equalled but by few." It al- 
most matches that verse invented for 
Wordsworth by Tennyson and Fitz- 
geraldj — 

" A Mister Wilkinson, a clergyman." 

The allusion to Kneeland and Thacher 
relates to a publication by Abner Knee- 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 63 
land, a retired minister, who, in his 
Deistical journal, the Boston Investi- 
gator, had published remarks which led 
to his prosecution for blasphemy, and 
his sentence to imprisonment by Judge 
Thacher of Boston. 

Emerson rather shrank from having 
his name associated with Kneeland and 
the vehement abolitionists, and censured 
Harriet Martineau for bringing him for- 
ward, in her once famous book on Amer- 
ica, as an abolitionist and social re- 
former. He wrote to Carlyle in May, 
1838, just before Lowell wrote his poem : 

" Meaning to do me a signal kindness, 
and a kindness quite out of all measure 
of justice, she does me a great annoy- 
ance — to take away from me my pri- 
vacy, and thrust me before my time 
(if ever there be a time) into the arena 
of the gladiators, to be stared at. I was 
ashamed to read, and am ashamed to 
remember. ?? 

This was before the burst of censure 



64 EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 
following the Divinity School address 
came on him ; for after that he could 
not avoid, and perhaps would not have 
wished to shun, the natural consequence 
of his own manliness. But it was yet 
some years before he publicly identified 
himself with the hated abolitionists ; so 
that Oarlyle felt warranted in 1843 in 
telling Theodore Parker, when the Bos- 
ton preacher spent the evening at Chel- 
sea, and advocated emancipation against 
Carlyle's roars about "Quashhee and his 
pumpkin," " Your neighbour Emerson, 
there in Concord, thinks about this just 
as I do." Nothing could be further 
from the truth ; and so Parker, after his 
return to Boston, in 1844, sent Carlyle 
the eloquent address of Emerson, August 
1, of that year, at Concord, praising 
English emancipation, and denouncing 
the timidity of Massachusetts on the 
question of negro slavery, and especially 
in allowing coloured seamen to be taken 
from her vessels by South Carolina slave- 
catchers.- — 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 65 
" Gentlemen, I thought the deck of a 
Massachusetts ship was as much the 
territory of Massachusetts as the floor on 
which we stand. It should be as sacred 
as the temple of God. If such a damnable 
outrage can be committed on the person 
of a citizen with impunity, let the Gover- 
nor break the broad seal of the State ; 
he bears the sword in vain. The great- 
hearted Puritans have left no posterity. 
The rich men may walk in State Street, 
but they walk without honor ; and the 
farmers may brag their democracy in 
the country, but they are disgraced 
men. ?? 

From that time until Emerson spoke 
in Washington before President Lincoln 
and his cabinet, advocating emancipa- 
tion as a war measure in 1862, there was 
no further question how he stood on the 
issue which was to divide the nation and 
be settled only by blood and iron. He 
had favoured buying the slaves from their 
masters, while that measure had even a 



66 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
faint possibility of being carried ; but, 
when John Brown and Abraham Lin- 
coln had decided that force held the only 
key to the slave's fetters, Emerson said 
in his " Boston Hymn" : — 

"Pay ransom to the owner, 

And fill the bag to the brim. 
Who is the owner 1 ? The slave is 
owner, 

And ever was. Pay him." 

Clearly had he brought out the truth 
of the situation in the autumn of 1859, 
when championing the cause of Brown, 
the martyr of Harper's Ferry, which no 
man did more forcibly : — 

" Who makes the Abolitionist ? The 
Slaveholder. The sentiment of mercy 
is the natural recoil which the laws of 
the universe provide, to protect man- 
kind from destruction by savage pas- 
sions. The arch- Abolitionist — older 
than Brown, older than the Shenandoah 
Mountains — is Love — whose other name 



EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 67 
is Justice ; which was before Alfred, 
before Lycurgus, before Slavery — and 
will be after it." 

This constant reference of human ac- 
tion and personal situations to the moral 
laws of the universe is the characteristic 
of Emerson from his earliest public utter- 
ances. It appears in literature as well 
as in pulpit eloquence and counsels of 
practical moment to his countrymen. 
His sermon at leaving his Boston parish 
was his first considerable printed paper ; 
soon followed by his Address at the bi- 
centennial celebration of the settlement 
of Concord by his ancestors, a copy of 
which, in its original blue-paper cover, 
was given me long ago by Emerson him- 
self. This copy is noteworthy as con- 
taining a correction by the author, in its 
second page. He had said, in quoting 
the short Saxon parable first cited by 
Bede, " Man's life" said the Druid to 
the Saxon king, "is the sparrow that en- 
ters at a window, flutters round the house, 



68 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
and flies out at another ; and none 
knoweth whence lie came or whither he 
goes." Eemembering that Druids had 
ceased out of England before the Saxons 
came in, he changed, in my copy, the 
word to "Witan" as it stands now in 
the reprint. Emerson also wrote, in 
1836, the first draft of the inscription on 
the battle-monument by the river ; but 
some of his elders, magnates of the little 
town, thought they could improve on the 
rhetoric of this great master of language, 
and changed jbhe inscription materially. 
So I was told by Dr. Edward Jarvis, a 
contemporary of Emerson. And here it 
may be noted that the celebrated Hymn 
sung at the dedication of this monument, 
though written in 1836, was not sung in 
that year, as the books err in stating, but 
on July 4, 1837, as may be seen by 
looking at the Yeoman 1 s Gazette of that 
month. 

The Historical Address is important 
as indicating the historic research and 



EALPH WALDO EMEBSOK 69 
serious eloquence of Emerson at the age 
of thirty-two ; but his first considerable 
contribution to literature was the thin 
volume of 1836 — Nature. This work 
has the great merit of presenting, in a 
small compass, a complete system of 
philosophy — not in long circuitous 
dialogue, like Plato, nor in a formi- 
dable array of syllogism and deduction, 
but in poetic assertions, every one of 
them resting on long meditation and 
consecutive thought. The logic was 
not visibly consecutive, but the reason- 
ing was, only those steps being omitted 
which the poet easily strides or flies 
over. 

Nature, as first printed, was a little 
book of ninety-five pages, which is now 
a worth its weight " in silver, if not 
yet in gold, selling, according to the 
eagerness of the purchaser, from fifteen 
to twenty -five dollars a copy. It is said 
that the small edition of five hundred 
was not all sold at the end of ten years. 



70 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
It varies in a few places from the re- 
printed editions — noticeably in tlie 
motto, which, in 1836, was from Tay- 
lor's Plotinus, and read thus : 66 Nature 
is but an image or imitation of wisdom, 
the last thing of the soul. Nature be- 
ing a thing which doth only do, but 
not know." Whether this was after- 
wards rejected as a mistranslation 
(many of Taylor's were) or because 
it might by jesters be applied to the 
book, I know not ; but in 1849, when 
first reprinted, it was replaced by the 
now familiar lines, in which the modern 
doctrine of evolution was concisely 
stated : — 

" A subtle chain of countless rings 
The next unto the farthest brings : 
The eye reads omens where it goes, 
And speaks all languages the rose ; 
And, striving to be Man, the worm 
Mounts through all the spires of 
form." 

There is little immediate connection 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 71 
between this text and the following 
discourse, although the doctrine is im- 
plied in the book which the verse sets 
forth. But the philosophical definition 
of Nature in the brief Introduction is 
one of the first great generalisations to 
startle the reader : — 

"The universe is composed of Nature 
and the Soul. Strictly speaking, there- 
fore, all that is separate from us — 
all which Philosophy distinguishes as 
the not me — that is, both nature and 
art, all other men and my own body, 
must be ranked under this name, 
Nature. " 

Indeed, the whole essay is but a 
sequence of startling generalisations, 
held together by a golden chain of 
eloquence, upon which sometimes ap- 
pear jewels of the clearest lustre, as 
where he describes the heroism of Ther- 
mopylae, in terms that Demosthenes 
might envy : — 

"When a noble act is done — per- 



72 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
chance in a scene of great natural 
beauty ; when Leonidas and his three 
hundred martyrs consume one day in 
dying, and the sun and moon come 
each and look at them once, in the 
steep defile of Thermopylae ; are not 
these heroes entitled to add the beauty 
of the scene to the beauty of the 
deed?" 

A problem of some curiosity occurs at 
the conclusion of Nature. The book was 
edited and partly written during the 
years of Emerson's first intimate ac- 
quaintance with Bronson Alcott, who, as 
Emerson said twenty years after, "had 
singular gifts for awakening contempla- 
tion and aspiration in simple and in 
cultivated persons," and on whose 
" subtle perception and facile generali- 
zation" Emerson set a very high value. 
Now there is a passage on pages 74 and 
75 of the first volume of the final edition 
of Emerson's works (the reprint of 
Nature} which is in exact accord with 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 73 
Alcott's IsTeo-Platonic philosophy, but 
less so with the more practical system of 
Emerson. It is introduced as what "a 
certain poet, an Orphic poet, sang to 
me ?? ; and it contains these words, dis- 
connected, as I quote them, but really 
parts of one thought : — 

1 c Man is a god in ruins. Infancy is the 
perpetual Messiah, which comes into the 
arms of fallen men, and pleads with them 
to return to paradise. Man is the dwarf 
of himself. Once he filled nature with 
his overflowing currents. Out from him 
sprang the sun and the moon ; from man 
the sun, from woman the moon. But, 
having made for himself this huge shell, 
his waters retired ; he no longer fills the 
veins and veinlets ; he is shrunk to a 
drop. He sees that the structure still 
fits him, but fits him colossally. He 
adores timidly his own work. Now is 
man the follower of the sun, and woman 
the follower of the moon. Yet some- 
times he starts in his slumber, and 



74 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
wonders at himself and his house, and 
muses strangely at the resemblance be- 
tween him and it. If he still have ele- 
mental power, it is not conscious power ; 
it is not inferior but superior to his will. 
It is instinct." 

This is very striking. To most readers 
in 1836 it must have seemed striking 
nonsense ; but it is exactly what Alcott 
taught in the years (1853-54) when I 
first knew him intimately, and by that 
time Emerson would] hardly have as- 
sented to it, except as he enjoyed the 
myths and parables of Plato. One day 
in November, 1854, Alcott came and 
dined with a few of us students at Cam- 
bridge, and, as it happened, in the very 
Divinity Hall where Emerson had uttered 
his eloquent heresies of 1838. I had 
come in from a lecture by Agassiz, and 
the talk began about him. Alcott com- 
plained that he, like most naturalists, 
except Thoreau, began with Matter : — 

"This is wrong: they should begin 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 75 
with Spirit. The Deity does not work 
in this way, building up man out of mat- 
ter, but man is rather a link between 
God and matter. Matter is the refuse of 
Spirit — the residuum not taken up and 
made pure spirit. All matter depends 
on man. This which we are now doing 
[dining] is an instance of what I mean 
as the use of matter by Spirit. Out of 
this food before us each selects what is 
needful for him and rejects the rest. So 
Spirit, selecting what is for its use, rejects 
the rest ; and to it this refuse is matter. 
It is best to say boldly that we are not 
formed from matter, but that we our- 
selves form it — that the eye creates what 
it looks upon, the desires what they act 
upon," etc. 

I said, " This is nearer the truth." But 
Alcott seemed to imply it was almost the 
exact truth. It would not have so ap- 
peared to Emerson, I think ; but he 
found it well to quote what I have cited 
as in Nature, and he allowed it to stand 



76 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
there, when he first reprinted the book, 
in 1849. But in the very end of Nature, 
where he again quotes u my Poet," he is 
giving the Emersonian variant from the 
Alcottian Plotinus. The Montaigne is 
not uppermost. Lowell termed Emer- 
son a " Plotinus-Montaigne " ; but the 
Plotinus is subdued to the Concord com- 
plexion, and does not perplex us with 
Oriental subtlety. It is, indeed, a 
Concord spring scene which he presents 
in these immortal words : — 

u As when the summer comes from the 
south, the snow-banks melt, and the face 
of the earth becomes green before it, 
so shall the advancing spirit create its 
ornaments along its path, and carry with 
it the beauty it visits and the song which 
enchants it ; it shall draw beautiful faces 
and warm hearts, and wise discourse, 
and heroic acts around its way, until 
evil is no more seen. The kingdom of 
man over nature — which cometh not 
with observation — a dominion such as 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 77 
now is beyond his dream of God, he 
shall enter without more wonder than 
the blind man feels who is gradually 
restored to perfect sight." 

No wonder the youths and maidens of 
the time were fascinated by language 
like this, and gathered to hear Emerson 
whenever they could ; it was the very 
atmosphere of youth, the springtime 
of life, that his utterances breathed. 
Those who afterwards came to notice as 
contributors to the Dial of 1840-44, 
— the Channings, Ellery and William 
Henry, nephews of the great preacher ; 
the Sturgis sisters, Ellen and Caroline ; 
Elizabeth Hoar, betrothed to Charles 
Emerson ; Margaret Fuller, Henry 
Thoreau, S. G. Ward, Freeman Clarke, 
and his artist-sister, Allston's pupil ; 
George Bradford, Theodore Parker, 
Elizabeth Peabody, Ednah Littlehale ; 
Eobert Bartlett and Marston Watson, of 
Plymouth ; and later James Lowell and 
George William Curtis — these and many 



78 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
more, older or younger, as years ad- 
vanced, came into the circle. Some of 
them, like myself, had been first startled 
into spiritual life by Carlyle's Sartor 
Eesartus, but soon found Emerson the 
more congenial guide ; others had begun 
with German poetry and philosophy, 
like Frederick Henry Hedge, or had 
reached the altars of culture by way of 
the anti-slavery or educational or temper- 
ance movements, all very active from 
1831 to 1850. All, or nearly all, might 
have expressed themselves (for lack of 
better words) as one of the circle long 
afterwards did : — 

"Ah! blest those years of youthful 
hope, 

When every breeze was Zephyr, every 

morning May ! 
Then, as we bravely climbed the slope 
Of Life's steep mount, we gained a 

wider scope 
At every stair, and could with joy 

survey 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 79 

The track beneath us and the upward 
way : 

Both lay in light, round both the 

breath of love, 
Fragrant and warm from Heaven's 

own tropic, blew ; 
Beside us what glad comrades smiled 

and strove ! 
Beyond us what dim visions rose to 

view ! 

With thee, dear Master ! through that 
morning land 

We journeyed happy 5 thine the guid- 
ing hand, 

Thine the far-looking eye, the daunt- 
less smile : — 

Thy lofty song of hope did the long 
march beguile." 

Thus Concord — where Emerson had 
chosen his home, for the sake of its an- 
cestral associations and its charming fa- 
cilities for rambling in wood and field 
or sailing on stream or lake — became a 
place of resort to the like-minded, and 
also for those uneasy beings who came 
within the reach of LowelPs lash : — 



80 EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 

" Who stretch, the new boots Earth's un- 
willing to try on, 

Whose hair's in the mortar of every 
new Zion, 

Who hunt, if they e'er hunt at all, 
with the lion, 

Though they hunt lions also, whenever 
they spy one." 

All these varieties of the dme incomprise 
showed themselves by turns, or in solemn 
troops and sad societies, in the vicinity 
of Emerson's house and pine-trees. But 
they were not induced to make their 
abode in Concord, as were those of a 
more congenial sort. Thoreau was born 
there, and never lived long anywhere 
else. Alcott came in 1840, occupying 
the Hosmer Cottage, where his artist- 
daughter, May, was born, and where his 
English friends visited him in 1842-43. 
Hawthorne settled in the Old Manse in 
1842, for his long honeymoon ; and 
Ellery Channing, from the prairies of 
Illinois and the pleasant circles of Cin- 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 81 
cinnati, came in the spring of 1843, 
bringing Ms bride, a younger sister of 
Margaret Fuller, who had been herself a 
frequent visitor long before that. Haw- 
thorne, in his Mosses, has explained 
why he came, and what influence Emer- 
son exerted over his slightly repellent 
nature ; but perhaps the testimony of 
Channing, in a letter to Emerson, best 
illustrates the attraction of the poet- 
philosopher : — 

" I have but one reason for settling in 
one place in America ; it is because you 
are there. I not only have no preference 
for any place, but I do not know that I 
should ever be able to settle upon any 
place, if you were not living. I came to 
Concord attracted by you ; because your 
mind, your talents, your cultivation, are 
superior to those of any man I know, 
living or dead. I incline to go where 
the man is, or where the men are, just as 
naturally as I should sit by the fire in 
the winter. The men are the fire, in 



82 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
this great winter of humanity. I regret 
you should have chosen for your place 
of residence a village so near Boston — 
in so flat a scenery, in so cold a climate, 
with so wretched a soil— where there 
are bigots in religion, and fantasts de- 
void of national opinion. I regret it, 
but cannot help it." 

I have not been able to find (and very I 
likely Mr. Channing does not remember) 
when he first met Emerson. The families 
were well acquainted, and it may have 
been in boyhood ; but the strong attach- 
ment indicated by this passage was in- 
spired from hearing his earlier Boston 
lectures, and reading the Essays and 
Orations, and Emerson's contributions to 
the Dial, first edited, in 1840-41, by 
George Eipley and Margaret Fuller, and 
then by Emerson himself, with Tho- 
reau ? s aid. Longfellow gave me an in- 
teresting account of his first interview 
with Emerson, whom he had not even 
seen until the young Bowdoin professor, 



BALPH WALDO EMEESON" 83 
after Lis first tour in Europe, was pre- 
paring to go again, before taking up his 
more serious duties at Harvard. The 
year was 1835, and the place, the steam- 
boat from Portland to Boston ; the time, 
probably early spring, since in April 
Longfellow sailed from New York for 
England. I quote from my journal of 
January 16, 1855 : — 

" Calling this afternoon on Professor 
Longfellow, and finding him alone, I 
stayed for an hour. As I rose to go, he 
urged me to stay. I said, 6 Young men 
are apt to receive more pleasure from 
their visits than they give.' He smiled, 
and said that feeling had prevented him 
from going to Weimar to see Goethe, 
when in Germany for the first time, in 
1829- — for which he had always been 
sorry ; 6 1 thought I should have noth- 
ing to say to him, and so I did not go. ? 
But in 1835 he had a letter of introduc- 
tion to Emerson, and was on his way to 
deliver it, when a friend on the boat told 



84 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
him that the man himself was on board. 
They went across the deck, and there 
found Mr. Emerson sitting inside a coil 
of rope, with his hat pulled over his 
eyes. They talked of Carlyle, whom 
Longfellow wished to see in London; 
and Emerson gave him a letter of intro- 
duction — adding that he had lately 
been sending his friend some American 
literature. 1 1 suppose you sent him 
Irving/ said Longfellow. 'Uo/ said 
Emerson, 'Mr. Irving is only a word- 
catcher. ? [He had, in fact, sent in 
May, 1834, a volume of "Webster, con- 
taining his Eeply to Hayne, and Obser- 
vations on the Growth of the Mind, by 
Sampson Eeed of Boston, whom Emerson 
styled "my Swedenborgian druggist. "] 
Longfellow went on to tell me that he 
found Emerson's letter a welcome intro- 
duction to Carlyle, who spoke in the 
warmest terms of him, and his visit to 
Mrs. Carlyle and himself at Craigenput- 
tock. But Mrs. Carl vie told Longfellow 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 85 
of the tragic fate of the first volume of 
the French Revolution, which her hus- 
band had just finished in manuscript, 
and lent to J. S. Mill, in whose library 
it had been carelessly burned by the ser- 
vant in lighting the fire. Carlyle said 
nothing about it, but it was a sore trial 
to him." 

This anecdote is now well known, and 
is touched upon in the early correspond- 
ence of Carlyle and Emerson, which is 
so full of the details of daily life, and 
discloses how materially Carlyle was 
aided by Emerson in getting his first 
books before the American public. More 
time and pains were spent by the Con- 
cord author on the editing and publica- 
tion of Carlyle' s works, and the essays 
and poems of Jones Very of Salem, be- 
tween 1836 and 1840, than on his own 
publications. Ellery Channing once re- 
marked of Emerson, "He worked for 
his friends ; he worked very little for 
himself." An instance of this was his 



86 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
defence of Bronson Alcott when the 
Boston newspapers attacked so savagely 
the Conversations on the Gospels, in 1837. 
He wrote a letter to the Advertiser, 
which that journal neglected to pub- 
lish ; but his letter to Mr. Buckingham, 
of the Courier, appeared, and contained 
this passage : — 

"In behalf of this book I have but 
one plea to make — this namely, let it 
be read. Any reasonable man will per- 
ceive that fragments out of a new theory 
of Christian instruction are not in the 
best place for examination between the 
Price Current and the Shipping-list, 
Try the effect of a passage from Plato's 
Phsedo or the Confessions of St. Augus- 
tine in the same place . . . Mr. Alcott 7 s 
methods cannot be said to have had a 
fair trial. But he is making an experi- 
ment in which all the friends of educa- 
tion are interested. And I ask you, sir, 
whether it be wise or just to add to 
the anxieties of his enterprise a public 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 87 
clamor against some detached sentences 
of a book which, as a whole, is per- 
vaded with original thought and sincere 
piety. " 

Meantime Emerson went on writing, 
lecturing, revising, and preparing to 
give his own thoughts to the public — 
neither discouraged by the small success 
of his Nature nor anxious about the 
fortune of his Essays, which began to 
come out in 1841, while the Dial was 
publishing several of his remarkable 
poems. This was the first notice the 
world in general had that Emerson was 
a poet ; and it was very differently re- 
ceived by different critics. To most his 
verses seemed harsh, tuneless, and often 
senseless ; to a few only was the strain 
sweet and oracular, at its best, and always 
full of thought, if melody seemed lacking. 
The common verdict on Emerson's Dial 
poems was rudely expressed by Dr. 
Holmes, addressing the grinning alumni 
of Harvard at their summer festival : — 



88 EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 

U A weak eclectic, groping vague and 
dim, 

Whose every angle is a half-starved 
whim ; 

Blind as a mole and curious as a lynx, 

Who rides a beetle, which he calls a 
'Sphinx': 

And oh, what questions, asked in club- 
foot rhyme, 

Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf- 
mute Time ! ?? 

But by June, 1845, a year after the 
demise of the Dial, Emerson writes to 
Carlyle : — 

"I tell you with some unwillingness, 
knowing your distaste for such things, 
that I have received so many applica- 
tions from readers and printers for a 
volume of poems that I have seriously 
taken in hand the collection, transcrip- 
tion, or scrip tion of such a volume, — and 
may do the enormity before New Year's 
day. Fear not, dear friend ! you shall 
not have to read one line. Perhaps I 
shall send you an official copy ; but I 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 89 
shall appeal to the tenderness of Jane 
Carlyle, and excuse your formidable self, 
for the benefit of both." 

It must not be thought, from this hu- 
morous apology to a man whose whim it 
was to disparage poesy, that Emerson 
really undervalued that form of litera- 
ture. On the contrary, it was his dear- 
est love ; and he had early in his career 
described himself (truly) as a poet. No- 
body has spoken more nobly of poesy, or 
extended its limits farther, in theory, 
than he. Of the many conversations 
held with him on this theme (though 
seldom with himself as the subject, 
since he avoided remark concerning his 
own verses), this one, held in 1878, re- 
mains liveliest in my memory. When I 
asked him for an autograph stanza, to 
accompany his portrait in the magazine 
where I was printing a sketch of him, 
Emerson said, — 

"It has been settled that I cannot 
write poetry." 



90 EALPH WALDO EMEESON" 

I said, "Has that at last been deter- 
mined?" 

" Yes, that is the voice of the public." 

"It was not so reported to me. I 
heard that you could write nothing else 
than poetry." 

The wise old poet smiled, as always 
when he got a close reply, and said, 
"I suppose everybody who writes verses 
at all has had this experience — you 
must have had it — they sometimes 
wrote lucky verses which seem excel- 
lent to themselves, however they may 
appear to others — so good that they do 
not get finished." I might have an- 
swered, but did not, out of regard for his 
proud humility, "that the unfinished 
poems are always the best ; that the 
great world itself is but one stanza of an 
incomplete song ; while the briefest frag- 
ment of a noble strain is less perishable 
than the very heavens. ' ' There are lines 
and whole poems of Emerson as secure 
of remembrance and citation as those im- 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 91 
mortal petals of Sappho's flowery gar- 
land, "few, but all golden/' as the 
Greeks loved to say. But it did not seem 
so, at first, to the critics. They treated 
Emerson as Sergeant Wakley, the coro- 
ner, treated Wordsworth — quoting his 
verses in derision, and asking the roar- 
ing House of Commons "what that 
meant, and whether a man should have 
a public reward for writing such stuff." 

The first book of Poems did appear 
in January, 1847, and they were com- 
mended anew to Carlyle's dislike in these 
terms : — 

"Poor man, you need not open 
them. I know all you can say. I 
printed them, not because I was de- 
ceived into a belief that they were 
poems, but because of the softness or 
hardness of heart of many friends here, 
who have made it a point to have them 
circulated. Once having set out to print, 
I obeyed the solicitations of John Chap- 
man, of an ill-omened street in London, 



92 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
to send him the book in manuscript, 
for the better securing of copyright. 
In printing them here, I have corrected 
the most unpardonable negligences, 
which must be all stereotyped under 
his fair London covers and gilt paper, 
to the eyes of any curious London 
reader, from which recollection I strive 
to turn away." 

With condescending tone did Carlyle 
reply (March 2, 1847) : — 

"I read your book of poems all faith- 
fully at Bay House, our Hampshire 
quarters ; where the obstinate people — 
with whom you are otherwise, in prose, 
a first favourite — foolishly refused to 
let me read aloud : foolishly, for I 
would have made it mostly all plain 
by commentary. So I had to read for 
myself; and can say, in spite of my 
hard-heartedness, I did gain, though 
under impediments, a real satisfaction, 
and some tone of the Eternal Melodies 
sounding, afar off, ever and anon, in 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 93 
my ear. A grand view of the Universe 
— everywhere the sound (unhappily 
far off, as it were) of a valiant, gen- 
uine human soul : this, even under 
rhyme, is a satisfaction worth some 
struggling for. But indeed you are 
very perverse. " 

Carlyle's patronising use of the word 
" satisfaction " reminds me of a later 
conversation in which Emerson was a 
hearer, and George Washington briefly 
the subject. In 1876 I was living in 
the Concord house where Thoreau spent 
his last years, and where in the dining- 
room his crayon head, by Eowse 
(drawn in that house in 1854), was 
hanging. One evening Emerson and 
his daughter, and that intimate of his 
family, Miss Elizabeth Hoar, were 
taking tea with me, and the conversa- 
tion turned on Washington, of whom 
Emerson spoke as "a heavy writer. " 
Miss Hoar said: "I met a Virginia 
lady in the city of Washington many 



94 EALPH WALDO EMEKSOST 
years ago, and she said to me : 1 1 be- 
lieve President Washington gave satis- 
fdhction to his countrymen. I think all 
the Virginia Presidents gave satisfahc- 
tion. J Attention was then drawn to 
Thoreau 7 s portrait ; and Miss Emerson 
said, "Father, I am glad you never 
wore a beard " (as Thoreau did in his 
later portraits). 

"I had none to wear/ 7 was the quiet 
reply. Had Emerson worn that wav- 
ing or curling poetic beard which the 
old bards affected, or even the waxed 
mustache or soft side-whiskers of 
French and English poetry, he would 
have been earlier recognised as a poet 
for the people. His hymn sung, by 
Thoreau and others, at the consecration 
of the Concord battle-monument, in 
1837, has given him that distinction. 

Still, it was true in 1847, and remains 
partly true now, that Emerson's poems 
need some explanation, as Carlyle hinted. 
They were Bostonian in the high sense ; 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 95 
and it might be said of them, as he said 
afterwards of early Boston, which Eng- 
land found so hard a nut to crack : — 

"For you, 'twas said, no barriers be, 
For you no sluggard rest ; 
Each street leads downward to the sea, 
Or landward to the west." 

There was a hint of infinity and im- 
mensity in the vast spaces of Oriental 
imagination which these dithyrambic 
verses opened to view. The prospect 
was like that conceived in Emerson's 
"Uriel," of which the three unities 
might be named as "Boundless Time," 
"Endless Space," and "Ceaseless Mo- 
tion." For what does he say? 

" It fell in the ancient periods 

Which the brooding Soul surveys, 
Or ever the wild Time coined itself 
Into calendar month and days." 

And with Emerson, as with Boston, 
his protection on the Orient and the 
Occident was obstacle as well as attrac- 
tion : — 



96 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 



" O liappy Bard beside the Sea, 

Whose roads lead everywhere to all ; 
Than thine no deeper moat can be, 
No stonter fence, no steeper wall." 

Let me dwell for a moment on this char- 
acteristic poem entitled "Boston," cer- 
tainly one of the highest tributes ever 
paid by poet to his birthplace, and 
worthy to be compared with that defiant 
outcry of Shakespeare in praise of his 
native island : — 

"This England never did and never 
shall 

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror ; 
This happy breed of men, this little 
world, 

This precious stone set in the silver 

sea, 

Which serves it in the office of a wall, 
Or as a moat defensive to a house, 
Against the envy of unhappier lands." 

Here may have been suggested to 
Emerson his figure of the moat and the 
wall ; and such hints will often be seen 
glancing through his verse, as where 



EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 97 
Wordsworth gave him a suggestion for 
one of the fine passages in "Monad- 
noc." But now hear : — 

"The waves that rocked them on the 
deep 

To them their secret told ; 
Said the winds that sung the lads to 
sleep, 

1 Like us be free and bold ! ? 
The honest waves refuse to slaves 
The empire of the ocean caves. 

"The sea returning day by day 
Bestores the world-wide mart ; 
So let each dweller on the Bay 

Fold Boston in his heart, 
Till these echoes be choked with 
snows, 

Or over the town blue ocean flows.' 7 

The poor critics, indeed, had a bad time 
with Emerson and his Concord brethren. 
One of them, Francis Bowen, a Harvard 
professor, undertook, with a gun like the 
Irishman's bent fowling-piece, intended 
1 1 to shoot round a corner, ' ? to bring down 
a flock of "nine new poets " at one dis- 



98 EALPH WALDO EMEBSCM 
charge, in the North American Beview, of 
which he was then (for our sins) the 
editor. Emerson was among the nine. 
So was Ellery Channing ; but Thoreau, 
not having issued any volume of verse, 
nor, indeed, of prose at that time, es- 
caped. How well qualified Mr. Bowen 
was to judge of poetry may be seen by 
the fact (mentioned by Longfellow in his 
diary for January 17, 1847) that he told 
the Cambridge poet, of whom he wished 
to borrow William Story's early verses, 
that Bulwer's New Timon was " the 
greatest poem that has appeared for fifty 
years 7 ' — greater, that is, than anything 
of Byron, Scott, or Shelley. Upon which 
Longfellow comments: "O Apollo! 
What a scourging the New School will 
get ! ? J And it did, Emerson being treated 
as it might be supposed such a Bhada- 
manthus would doom him. The un- 
favourable critics were as two to one, 
even as it was with the moistened 
Welshmen of the song my mother used 
to sing to *her boys : — 



EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 99 

u Three jolly Welshmen, as I have heard 
say, 

They would go a-hunting upon St. 

David's Day ; 
All day they hunted, and nothing could 

they find 

But a ship a-sailing, a-sailing with the 
wind : 

One said it was a ship, another said 
'W ; 

The third said it was a house and 
chimney blown away. 

"All night they hunted, and nothing 

could they find 
But the moon a-gliding, a-gliding with 

the wind ; 
One said it was the moon, and another 

said 6 nay ' ; 
The third said it was a cheese, and half 

cut away." 

How much the critical wind has 
changed in the last fifty years may be 
seen by an announcement that the four 
volumes of the Dial are to be reprinted this 
year, covers and all, — chiefly, it would 
seem, for the poems and prose of Emer- 

LofC. 



100 EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 
son and his ' ( New School ? ? there printed, 
— among them, two Channings, Thoreau, 
two Misses Hooper, Margaret Puller, 
Alcott, Freeman Clarke, and James 
Lowell. Emerson did not pride himself 
greatly on the Dial : it was a part of his 
dream of an international magazine, in 
which the newer spiritual philosophy 
should be fairly treated, as it could not 
be in the older American reviews. Ten 
years after his poems came out, the 
Atlantic Monthly fulfilled in part his ex- 
pectation in this respect, dealing also 
courageously with the political infamy 
of Buchanan' s administration. Emerson 
had much to do with founding it ; and 
it was begun by his publishers — then 
Phillips & Sampson — who had suc- 
ceeded to James Munroe in Emerson's 
publications. In it appeared most of 
his later poems, several of which he read 
to me in manuscript in the summer of 
1856. I was then corresponding with 
Charles Lowell, nephew of the poet, and 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 101 
an admirer of Emerson ; in a letter to 
him in Europe in 1856 occurs this : — 

"I had a great pleasure, a week or 
two since, in hearing Emerson read some 
of his unprinted poems, among them 
some translations from the Eastern poets, 
Hafiz, Saadi, and others, which he knows 
through the German of Von Hammer. 
They seemed to me very fine and equal 
to his published poems. One original 
piece was called 'The Days/ and was 
in his best vein. Do you remember the 
poem 6 Saadi 7 in his volume ? He read 
me some omitted lines which belong in 
that, as good as any there. That poem 
has always been a favorite with me, and 
I was glad to learn that he likes it him- 
self. He will soon publish a new edition 
of the old poems, making only a few 
changes. By and by he will add and 
take away, and make a new book unlike 
the old. You may imagine what a 
pleasure it was to sit in his study and 
hear him read his new verses. 77 



102 EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 

All these were afterwards given in the 
Atlantic ; and the changes contemplated 
were made in the early volume, but not 
till after a second book had appeared in 
1867. Why some omissions were made I 
never knew. The most important was to 
leave out the daring version from Hafiz, 
near the end of the edition of 1847, 
"Ghaselle" ; nor was this restored in 
the enlarged volume of 1884, containing 
much that Emerson left in manuscript. 
He had a fatherly interest in the Atlantic, 
and was not too well pleased with some 
of the caprices of its successive editors. 
Once, after sending a good poem by a 
correspondent of his to the editor, and 
having it returned to him, he said to me, 
" We thought we had some rights in our 
own magazine 7 ' ; and later, when his 
own Boston poem (quoted above) was 
delayed and made to give place to an 
inferior one by another poet, he with- 
drew his verses, and it was some time 
after that a humble apology by the 



EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 103 
editor secured their return and publica- 
tion. He was seldom in haste to print, 
and in later years would vex his pub- 
lishers by delaying the copy or proofs. 
Yet in the years from 1840 to 1872, his 
period of active writing and lecturing, 
he issued volumes in ten or twelve differ- 
ent years. 

Mr. Alcott explained to me in No- 
vember, 1854, Emerson's way of writing, 
as, I believe, it always was. He said : 
"He puts down in his commonplace 
books whatever he thinks worthy 5 and in 
the fall, when he is preparing his lect- 
ures or when he is making up a book at 
any time, he goes over these books and 
notices what topic has been uppermost 
in his thought, arranging his fragments 
with reference to that. This accounts 
for the want of formal method in his 
works. They are crystallisations." In 
later years they became compilations ; 
and he drew not only from the journals 
and note-books, but from finished ser- 



104 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
mons and lectures. In this way, during 
1870-71, Emerson nullified the result of 
much previous labour on what he meant 
to be his chief work, The Natural History 
of the Intellect. He was then, after long 
neglect by Harvard University, invited 
to give a course of philosophical lectures 
there, and undertook to present the 
material for this proposed work in the 
lecture form. It was too late in his life, 
and the effort was too much for him. 
Writing to Carlyle in June, 1870, he 
says : — 

"The oppressive engagement of writ- 
ing and reading eighteen lectures on 
Philosophy to a class of graduates in 
the College, and these in six successive 
weeks, was a task a little more formi- 
dable in prospect and in practice than 
any foregoing one. It made me a pris- 
oner, and held me to such frantic de- 
votion to my work as must spoil that 
also. ... I doubt the experts in Philos- 
ophy will not praise my discourses ) but 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 105 
the topics gave me room for my guesses, 
! admirations, and experiences with the 
accepted masters, and also all the lessons 
I have learned from the hidden great. 
I have the fancy that a realist is a good 
corrector of formalism, no matter how 
incapable of syllogism or continuous 
linked statement. To great results of 
thought and morals the steps are not many ; 
and it is not the masters who spin the osten- 
tatious continuity." 

This last sentence contains the key to 
Emerson's mode of philosophising ; and 
it is a thousand pities that he had not 
earlier in life been enabled to develop 
his rich material from observation and 
reading into the contemplated volume. 
Writing to Carlyle the next year (April 
10, 1871), he was even more discouraged 
at the result of the Harvard experi- 
ment : — 

" Here were eighteen lectures, each to 
be read sixteen miles away from my 
house, to go and come, and the same 



106 EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 
work and journey twice in each week — 
and I have just got through, the doleful 
ordeal. I have abundance of good read- 
ings and some honest writing on the 
leading topics — but in haste and con- 
fusion they are misplaced and spoiled. 
I hope the ruin of no young man's soul 
will here or hereafter be charged to me, 
as having wasted his time or confounded 
his reason. v 

A kind friend, John Forbes, whose 
son had married Emerson's daughter, 
came to the rescue after this exhausting 
and almost fruitless task, and carried the 
philosopher to Utah and California in 
the spring of 1871 ; but it was too late 
to repair the harm done to the papers 
and to the author. From that time a 
visible change was noticed in the exact 
memory of Emerson, not before affected 
by age. The next year occurred the 
partial burning of his house and the loss 
or confusion of many of his papers ; and 
this event, though it led to a munificent 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 107 
gift from his friends, restoring his house 
to more than its former convenience, in- 
jured the delicate structure of his intel- 
lect, and prevented him from under- 
taking the work of setting his manu- 
scripts in due order. In 1872 he sailed 
for Europe, visited Egypt, and renewed 
his long intimacy with Carlyle ; but little 
fruit of this journey ever appeared in 
his writings or speeches. His literary 
activity really ceased with 1871, though 
he lived more than ten years longer. 
With his prophetic insight he had fore- 
seen this also ; for as early as 1866 
had been written those touching and 
lofty verses on old age, in which he 
said : — 

" Economize the failing river, 
Not the less revere the Giver ; 
Timely wise, accept the terms,— 
Soften the fall with wary foot ; 
A little while 
Still plan and smile, 
And — fault of novel germs — 
Mature the unfallen fruit." 



108 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 

He still lectured — at the Virginia Uni- 
versity in 1876, at the Concord School 
of Philosophy in 1879-80 — and read 
reminiscent and critical papers on Car- 
lyle and Thoreau ; but he ceased even 
to write letters, and it became an effort 
to frame the syllables of his own name 
with the pen that had delighted and in- 
structed the world. 



in. 

A wise man once said to his friend, 
u Mankind will forgive you everything 
but superiority. 7 ' In time they forgive 
this also, but not commonly until death 
has intervened. With Emerson it was 
otherwise ; for, though the early aver- 
sion and derision which he encountered 
were due to the dimly recognised fact 
that he stood above the average level of 
men, yet his kindly and modest bearing, 
and his quiet fulfilment of all the duties 
of life, public and private, disarmed 
envy, and seemed to lessen the inevitable 
distance at which the superior man 
stands from most of his contemporaries. 
They were conscious of this distance, 
however, in Emerson's case ; and so was 
he in a naive form. He said to a friend, 
"I have a great faculty of imposing 
silence on others" — a fact which he re- 
gretted, but for which his modesty would 
not allow him exactly to account, No 



110 KALPH WALDO EMEKSON 
judgment on Emerson will be valid 
which, does not recognise this native and 
absolute superiority in him, as in George 
Washington. Another trait very re- 
markable in Washington was as notable 
in Emerson — that instinctive prudence 
which kept him out of compromising sit- 
uations, and left so little ground for 
humiliation and vain regrets. He was 
associated with men who were apt to 
commit faults of enthusiasm, of taste, of 
untimely zeal, or embarrassing kindness ; 
but how faultless was Emerson in these 
respects ! It was not caution nor cold- 
ness nor selfish regard, but like the 
watchful care of a guardian spirit, such 
as the Demon of Socrates, so much dis- 
puted. Emerson's own word for this 
may be found in his "Guy," who 

"In strange junctures felt with awe 
His own symmetry with law," — 

an idea which often occurs in his books, 
with various turns of expression. 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 111 
I have used the cold word 1 1 prudence, ' ? 
but in the old sense of foresight. To 
this Emerson added what Washington 
and most Americans conspicuously lack 
— the poetic insight, — a quality so 
diverse that of itself the distance between 
the two marks the breadth of Emerson's 
mind. I have called him primarily a 
poet ; and it must further be said, as he 
said of Milton, that in him "the man 
was paramount to the poet." Had he 
never written a line of verse, he would 
still have been a poet by virtue of that 
clairvoyance of the imagination which 
is the one sure token of poetic power. 
Wordsworth's " accomplishment of verse" 
is quite another thing, not commonly 
divorced from the poetfs insight, but 
seldom entirely united and fused with 
that. Even then a third rarity is wont 
to be absent — a masculine soul to con- 
trol these gifts of genius, and make their 
possessor a true man as well as true 
poet. 



112 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 

Another resemblance of Emerson to 
the Puritan poet may be traced in what 
he quaintly said in 1838 : " Among so 
many contrivances as the world has seen 
to make holiness ugly, in Milton it was 
so pure a flame that the foremost im- 
pression of his character is that of ele- 
gance. His virtues are so graceful that 
they seem rather talents than labors. " 
And, again, of Milton's religion : "The 
most devout man of his time, he fre- 
quented no church, probably from dis- 
gust at the fierce spirit of the pulpits/' 
That force, purity, and gentleness of 
will which give Milton pre-eminence 
were no less marked in Emerson, whose 
fortune it was, also, to be thrown on a 
time when this austere magnanimity, 
like Milton's, could give genius its best 
sanction, and durably stamp its impres- 
sion on succeeding times. It is in these 
that Emerson will be best judged ; and 
even his alleged heresies in religion will 
be viewed very differently hereafter. 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 113 
At one of Alcott's famous Boston Con- 
versations of 1850, reported by Mrs. 
Cheney, Emerson threw in this profound 
remark: "We say our times have not 
religion, just as we have not sun when it 
rains ; but the rain itself is a superlative 
effect of the sun. And so, while we 
depart from the forms once called re- 
ligious, that very departure is the more 
religious." 

The contrasts in Emerson's character 
which entitle him to be called versatile, 
as Shakespeare was, are often perplex- 
ing. In that omitted poem of Hafiz, 
formerly mentioned, we find this strange 
sentiment : — 

" Of Paradise, O hermit wise, let us re- 
nounce the thought ! 

Of old therein our names of sin Allah 
recorded not. 

Thy mind the mosque and cool kiosk, — 
spare fast and orisons ; 

Mine me allows the drinking-house and 
sweet chase of the nuns. 



114 EALPH WALDO EMEESOIST 

"Up, Hafiz ! grace from high God's face 
beams on thee pure ; 
Shy thou not Hell, and trust thou well, 
Heaven is secure." 

It may be well to give here a specimen 
of Von Hammer's German, with Emer- 
son's prose version — a good sample of 
the "Ghaselle/ ' ending with the poet's 
name : — 

6 i Wie gliicklich ist des Ostes Ambraross ! 
Priih steht er auf voll von Begier nach 
dir. 

O schon beschwingter Vogel, zeig ? den 
Weg! 

Mein Aug' zerfloss aus Sehnsucht nach 

dem Staub. 
Ich schwimm ? im Blut, und meiner 

eingedenk 
Betrachtet man den neuen Mond mit 

Huld. 

Aus Liebe deiner Wangen werden einst 
Auf meinem Grab statt Griisern Eosen 
bliihn. 

Ich lebe ohne dich \ O pf ui der Schaam. ! 
Vielleicht verzeihst du mir, wie that 
ich's sonst. 



EALPH WALDO EMEESOST 115 

Der Morgen hat von deinem Freund 
gelernt, 

Deshalb zerreisset er der Wolken Kleid. 
O schmahle mich nicht aus, du zarter 
Sinn, 

Im Namen Gottes hat's Hafiz gesagt." 

(Der Diwan, etc., vol. ii. 339.) 

EMERSON'S PROSE VERSION. 

" How happy is the Amber horse of the 
East! 

Early stands he up, fall of desire for 
thee. 

0 beautiful feathered bird, show the 

way. 

Mine eye melted out of longing after the 
dust of thy foot. 

1 swim in blood ; and, thinking of me, 
The new moon looks on with affection. 
Out of love of thy cheek will hereafter 
On my grave roses bloom instead of 

grass. 

I live without thee ! O fie for shame ! 
Perchance thou pardonest that I once 

did otherwise. 
The Morn has learned of thy friend, 
And so tears away the mantle of clouds. 
Oh, chide me not, thou softer soul, 
In the name of God has Hafiz spoken. " 



116 BALPH WALDO EMEKSON 

Emerson's custom was first to turn the 
rhythmical German into prose (here line 
for line), and then to versify it. There 
are slight errors in this rendering, and 
the German is rather blind in spots. I 
should translate it : — 

"How fortunate are Morning's amber 

steeds, 

Early uprisen, they see thee with 
desire. 

Fair bird on pinion swift, point us the 
way ! 

Tears of regret for thee my eyelid 
breeds. 

They fall in dust, — my tears of blood 
and fire ; 

Yet, to my thinking, we as vainly may 
Admire thee as to the moon we homage 
pay. 

For love of thy fair cheeks shall roses 
bloom, 

When I am gone, above my grassy 
tomb. 

I live without thee ? Sooner would I 
die. 

Forgive me that I once did, — blind 
was I. 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 117 

A lesson to thy lover Morn hath given, 
Tearing away the cloudy robe of 
Heaven. 

Ah ! chide me not, dear heart, for 

speech too bold ! 
In Allah's name is Hajiz's passion 

told." 

In his remarkable Phoenix-poem (ii. 
308-309), Emerson did not translate all, 
only five stanzas, omitting the last two, 
thus : — 

"My phoenix long ago secured 

His nest in the sky- vault's cope ; 
In the body's cage immured, 
He was weary of life's hope. 

"Bound and round this heap of ashes 
Now flies the bird amain, 
But in that odorous niche of heaven 
Nestles the bird again. 

"Once flies he upward, he will perch 
On Tuba's golden bough ; 
His home is on that fruited arch 
That cools the blest below. 

" If over this world of ours 

His wings my phoenix spread, 



118 EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 

How gracious falls on land and sea 
The soul-refreshing shade ! 

" Either world inhabits he, 

Sees oft below him planets roll ; 
His body is all of air compact, 
Of Allah's love his soul." 

Evidently, Emerson has improved on 
his original. I would render the omitted 
verses (much poorer) thus : — 

" In highest worlds, through spacious air, 
My Phoenix wings his flight • 
Of Paradise the rose-parterre 
Affords his banquet light. 

" But, Eafiz, live not thou forlorn, 
The truth of God proclaim ! 
On every heart of man or sprite 
Inscribe the One God's name." 

In a note to this "Ghaselle/ 7 Von 
Hammer says : — 

"The Persian word is only 'Bird' ; 
but since this stanza about the upward- 
return flight, from the heap of ashes, 
plainly alludes to the fable of the 
Phoenix, it seems all right to give the 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 119 
bird that name. He is the Spirit, which 
soars away, high over all things earthly, 
to Unity of and with God. This Ode 
does not refuse the loftiest mystical 
interpretation. " 

This version and other semi-religious 
poems from the Persian, with the fasci- 
nating love-poems of his own, indicate 
that few regions of the sentiments were 
left unexplored, and justify the com- 
parison between Goethe and Emerson 
which is sometimes made. With the 
bulk and dramatic quality of Goethe's 
work there is no comparison ; but, if 
quality and range are alone considered, 
Emerson will be found to have con- 
tinued Goethe in a later age, and with 
a manlier and more moral tone. The 
wisdom of our American is as marked as 
that of the German, and it is occupied 
with American problems. 

In his lifelong friendships and hospi- 
talities, Emerson takes rank with the 
foremost in literature. Without de- 



120 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
pendence on the great, and with a fort- 
une never large, even by the moderate 
standards of seventy years ago in New 
England, he was yet able to attract nu- 
merous friends and to promote their 
wishes and ambitions in a remarkable 
degree. Tolerant of differences and 
hopeful of possibilities, he went through 
life conferring benefit and disclaiming 
gratitude ; encouraging every promise 
of talent in others, and co-operating in 
causes which the powerful avoided until 
they became sources of power to them- 
selves ; ever ready, also, to bestow that 
praise on high courage which the passing 
world awards mostly to present success. 
The exiled Hungarian patriot and the 
defeated, desperate valour of Osawatomie 
Brown received from Emerson the award 
at once which the future was sure to 
confer ; and no national crime or social 
infamy ventured to expect his connivance. 
On such occasions there appeared in his 
bearing and language something of that 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 121 
spirit which Burke commemorated in 
Keppel : "Though it was never shown 
in insult to any human being. Lord 
Keppel was something high. It was a 
wild stock of pride on which the tender- 
est of all hearts had grafted the milder 
virtues. ? ' Severity was latent in Emer- 
son's nature, though his courtesy was 
such that it seldom showed except in 
kindly satire. But once, in describing 
to me an offensive being from whom he 
had received much annoyance, he said : 
"Did you never see him? He was an 
ill-looking person. When he was young, 
he fell into the fire, and somebody was 
misguided enough to pull him out." 

Like most poets, he was much under 
the influence of beauty in its various 
forms, and could hardly ascribe anything 
but excellence to the endowment of per- 
sonal beauty. He associated the beauti- 
ful with the good ; and, like Augustine 
and the best philosophers, he would not 
allow the existence of positive and orig- 



122 EALPH WALDO EMERSON 
inal evil. But of sin, even in a theo- 
logical sense, he had a clear perception, 
contrary to what some theologians have 
said of him ; and he knew the dark 
places of the human heart as well as 
Hawthorne did, though he did not de- 
light in their portrayal. 

It was as a lecturer that Emerson first 
became known beyond the small circles 
which heard him in the Unitarian pul- 
pit ; and something should be said of 
him in this character. He began earlier 
and continued longer in it than most of 
his contemporaries ; for he lectured in 
Concord before 1830, and his last lecture 
there, at the School of Philosophy in the 
Town Hall, was in the summer of 1880. 
The number of those who have heard 
him diminishes fast; but few can fail to 
recall how strong was the impression 
made by his deep and earnest voice, his 
manner, often hesitant, and his senten- 
tious modes of expression, tinged with 
quaint humour and a pungent wit. His 



EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 123 
gesture was simple, his look serious and 
manly. An artist of kindred spirit, 
David Scott, of Edinburgh, painted him 
in 1848 as he appeared on the platform 
in the Scotch capital, catching even his 
peculiar gesticulation with the closed 
hand. This portrait, though darker in 
complexion than Emerson, is, on the 
whole, the best presentation of the poet- 
sage in his vigorous middle life. Bron- 
son Alcott, who heard him almost every 
year, in pulpit or lecturer's desk, from 
1829 to 1881, has also best described 
his attitude and manner there. He 
wrote : — 

(1837.) " Emerson the lecturer al- 
ways kindles a sublime sentiment when, 
in those deep and oracular undertones 
which he knows so well when and how 
to use, he speaks of the divine entities. 
A solemn, supernatural awe creeps over 
one as the severe pathos of his manner 
and his unaffected earnestness come upon 
the senses. Now bordering almost on 



124 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
coarseness, from the terms that he weaves 
into his diction and the picture of vul- 
gar life that he draws with a Shake- 
spearean boldness of delineation; and now 
gliding into all that is beautiful, refined, 
elegant in thought, speech, action, and 
vocation — he bursts upon the hearer 
in strains of lofty thought and charms 
of diction. His is the poet's, not the 
logician's power : he states, pictures, 
sketches, but does not reason. He leaves 
things in the place where Nature left 
them, never deranging that order for a 
special logical analysis. " 

(1865.) 1 6 See our Ion standing there, 
his audience, his manuscript before him 
— himself an auditor, as he reads, of the 
Genius sitting behind him and to whom 
he defers, eagerly catching the words — 
the words — as if the accents were first 
reaching his ears, too, and entrancing 
alike oracle and auditor. We admire 
the stately sense, the splendor of dic- 
tion, and are surprised as we listen. 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 125 
Even his hesitancy between the delivery 
of his periods, his perilous passage from 
paragraph to paragraph of manuscript, 
we have almost learned to like; as if 
he were but sorting his keys meanwhile, 
for opening his cabinets; the spring of 
locks following — himself seeming as 
eager as any of us to get sight of his 
specimens. His rhetoric, voiced as by 
organ stops, delivers the sentiment from 
his breast in cadences peculiar to him- 
self ; now hurling it forth on the ear, 
echoing ; then, as his mood and manner 
invite, dying like 

' Music of mild lutes 
Or silver-coated flutes ; 
Or the concealing winds that can convey 
Never their tone to the rude ear of day.' 

His compositions affect us not as logic 
linked in syllogisms, but as voluntaries 
rather, or preludes, in which one is not 
tied to any design of air, but may vary 
his key or note at pleasure. His rhet- 



126 EALPH WALDO EMEBSON 
oric dazzles by circuits — contrasts — an- 
titheses; imagination, as in all sprightly 
minds, being his wand of power. ' ? 

No contrast could well be greater than 
that between Emerson and Thoreau lect- 
uring, though both were equally orig- 
inal, and perhaps Thoreau the more 
unexpected of the two in his utterances. 
But, except for seriousness and the ex- 
pression which wise thought imprints on 
the features, Thoreau had none of the 
armory of eloquence, while Emerson had 
trained himself from boyhood to recite 
and impress by his manner of speaking. 
His written style is well characterised 
by Ellery Ohanning, who says : — 

"Dr. Channing first broke up the 
Johnsonian period into short sentences, 
and used simplicity for artifice. Emer- 
son took this short style from Channing, 
but carried it farther; he wrote with 
much more point, and I think was never 
excelled, if equalled, in English. When 
writing his lectures, in a large, flowing 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 127 
hand, sitting in his rocking-chair in the 
study, his portfolio on his knee, he 
would copy from his journals, and as he 
wrote cast the pages on the floor. In 
this mode of writing from journals, Tho- 
reau copied him; yet there was no such 
thing as conscious imitation, for Thoreau 
never imitated anybody. In him there 
was nothing but originality, as I know 
from my many hours with him. Yet 
his handwriting had such a resemblance 
to Emerson's that I could hardly tell 
them apart; it was very strange. An- 
other point of resemblance — in my walks 
with Emerson (not less than a thousand) 
I seldom heard him mention any person 
by name ; he had singular titles for 
Thoreau and others, avoiding their per- 
sonal appellation. Thoreau had much 
the same habit, nor did he usually reply 
directly to any observation or question 
of mine, but went on with original re- 
marks of his own." 

At one time (it was in 1853) an ar- 



128 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
rangement was made, but never com- 
pleted, for writing down in the form of 
conversations the thoughts and incidents 
of the walks of Emerson, Alcott, Tho- 
reau, and Ohanning in Concord and its 
vicinity. The title of the work was to 
be Country Walking, and portions of it 
were printed by Channing in his Life of 
Thoreau, in 1871, where the remarks of 
the four friends appear without much 
discrimination of authorship. I do not 
find that Hawthorne joined in these 
walks often; he did not walk much, and 
was not a man of habits. Channing said 
of him, " There are very few like Haw- 
thorne, he would fly away from a sub- 
ject and throw off what you might offer 
him about it — as if he could not bear to 
be overlooked by his thoughts, as most 
of us are. ? ? 

When Emerson said, u The ornaments 
of a house are the friends who frequent 
it," he but expressed the conditions of 
his life in Concord, in England, or 



EALPH WALDO EMEKSON 129 
wherever lie might be. His long visit 
to Great Britain and France in 1847-48 
gave him many personal friends in 
Europe ; but those who gathered round 
him at home were the best evidence of 
his wide affections and his formative in- 
fluence among his countrymen. No man 
was more conscious of the delicate dis- 
tinctions of character among men, none 
less regardful of them in admitting per- 
sons of every class to his acquaintance, 
and, if found worthy, to his intimacy. 
He once said to several of us : " I have 
the trick of believing every man I talk 
with as old as myself. So I warn you, 
young men ! ? ? With this equality of 
association there was no lack of the dis- 
tant respect which was paid to him by 
his companions. They felt, each in his 
own manner, the presence of a generous 
superiority which he could not entirely 
waive, however much he might wish it. 
Yet his recognition of talent in others 
lacked the patronising tone which 



130 EALPH WALDO EMEESON 
smaller souls have been known to as- 
sume. He viewed Thoreau and Carlyle, 
and that later friend of daring genius 
and a few quaint affectations, Walt 
Whitman, with sincere admiration, and 
saluted each "at the beginning of a 
great career, " as he declared to Whit- 
man in a letter which the pleased author 
made too much haste to publish, thereby 
wounding Emerson's scrupulous sense of 
propriety. But this did not quench his 
esteem for Whitman, of whose Leaves of 
Grass he said to me in 1855, "It is a 
singular blending of the Bhagvat Ghita 
and the New York Herald," that 
paper then being the type of what was 
coarse and unscrupulous in journalism. 
Twenty-five years later, on Whitman's 
sole visit to Concord, they met in Emer- 
son's house and in mine, with mutual 
regard, which Whitman has expressed 
in his brief account of the visit. Emer- 
son's eulogy on Thoreau at his funeral Is 
well known ; and it was his earnest wish 



EALPH WALDO EMEESON 131 
that Alcott might die first, so that he 
himself could properly celebrate the high 
qualities of that friend of almost half a 
century. The circle of these warm 
friendships was broken only by death ; 
and each might say to the other what 
Mary Emerson said of her associates, 
"We measure duration by the number 
of our thoughts, by the activity of 
reason, the discovery of truths, the ac- 
quirement of virtue, the approach to 
God." 

Of these friends Emerson was the best 
spokesman ; but his excellence of ex- 
pression owed something to each of them, 
while the manner of it was peculiarly 
his own. If this peculiarity sometimes 
became mannerism, it was no more than 
always happens where originality exists 
in full measure ; and, with all his bor- 
rowings from the wisdom of others, no 
writer of the last century will be found to 
have been more intimately original or to 
have influenced more profoundly the sen- 



132 RALPH WALDO EMEESON 



timent and thought of his period. He 
died April 27, 1882, after some years of 
failing memory and partial retirement 
from society, his last public appearance 
being to attend the funerals of Long- 
fellow and another friend. Universal 
regret and praise followed his death; 
and he is buried with his mother and 
brothers, his own family, and with Haw- 
thorne, Thoreau, and the Alcotts, in the 
beautiful woodland cemetery which his 
eloquence and the pensive verse of 
Ellery Channing had consecrated years 
before. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY. 



A full bibliography of everything 
written by and about Emerson since he 
appeared as author would almost fill a 
volume like this. That in Dr. Garnett's 
Life of Emerson — perhaps the best short 
biography — fills thirteen double-column 
pages ; and twice as much more could 
now be added. What is here given is 
a selection of the best or rarest works, 
and chiefly in English ; although some 
of the best appreciations of Emerson 
are in French, German, Swedish, and 
Italian, and more recently in modern 
Greek, into which some of Emerson's 
books have been translated. First are 
to be named Emerson's writings, of 
which many remain in manuscript. 
The best edition of the collected works 
(much that has been printed long since 
or recently is not yet collected in uni- 
form volumes) was edited by J. E. Cabot 
and E. W. Emerson, in twelve volumes 



134 BIBLIOGEAPHY 
octavo, 1883-93, published by Hough- 
ton, Mifflin & Co., Boston. As a rule, 
the mottoes in verse are Emerson's (some 
of them not in the enlarged Poems) ; but 
a few are from Wordsworth and other 
authors. Of the volumes relating di- 
rectly and indirectly to Emerson, the 
following, arranged in chronological 
order, are the most important : — 

L Ealph Waldo Emerson : An Es- 
timate of his Character and Gen- 
ius in Prose and Verse. By A. 
Bronson Alcott. (Boston, 1882 : A. 
Williams & Co.) This gives Alcott' s 
final estimate of his friend, and is the 
last work to which he put his hand. 
While it was going through the press, 
Mr. Alcott was attacked with the illness 
from which he never recovered. 

II. The Correspondence of Thomas 
Carlyle and Ealph Waldo Emer- 
son. (Boston and New York, 1883 : 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) This work, 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 135 
first published by J. E. Osgood, was 
edited by Professor Norton, and is in- 
valuable biographically for both the 
friends. An intercalary volume of 1885 
contains lost and recovered letters. Now 
in two thick volumes, indexed. 

III. The Genius and Character of 
Emerson. Lectures at the Concord 
School of Philosophy, 1884. (Boston 
and New York, 1885 : Houghton, Mifflin 
& Co.) Emerson had originally planned 
a school similar to this famous one, and 
twice lectured at this, in 1879 and 1880. 
The writers in this volume were A. B. 
Alcott, Dr. C. A. Bartol, Mrs. E. D. 
Cheney, G. W. Cooke, Dr. W. T. Har- 
ris, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Julian 
Hawthorne, E. D. Mead, P. C. Mozooni- 
dar, Miss E. P. Peabody, M. E. de 
Poyen Bellisle, and F. B. Sanborn ; 
while poems were contributed by Ellery 
Channing, Bronson Alcott, Mrs. E. C. 
Kinney, Emma Lazarus, and F. B. San- 



136 BIBLIOGKAPHY 
born, who edited the volume. Its value 
partly lies in the fact that, of the four- 
teen contributors, twelve had known 
Emerson personally, most of them for 
many years, and spoke with an appre- 
ciation of the man not formed wholly 
from reading him or about him. Their 
variety of character also added a merit 
to the book. 

IV. A Memoir of Ealph Waldo 
Emerson. By J. Elliot Cabot. (Bos- 
ton and New York, 1887 : Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co. Two volumes.) More 
than half is in Emerson's own words, 
drawn from letters, diaries, and un- 
printed papers : hence its unique value. 
Mr. Cabot was an early and late friend, 
full of discretion, and therefore selected 
as editor and biographer. His appre- 
ciation of Emerson lacks some elements 
of perception, and his expression is often 
colder than his own feeling. But this 
is the biography that all should read. 



BIBLIOGBAPHY 137 

V. Life of E. W. Emerson. By Kich- 
ard Garnett, LL.D. In u Great Writers' 
Series." (London, 1888: Scott.) Dr. 
Garnett, using the earlier biographies, 
and not being hampered by precon- 
ceived opinions, has here given an ad- 
mirable summary of Emerson's qualities, 
and views him more exactly in relation 
to other great authors, recent or ancient, 
than any of those just named. His bib- 
liography, also, prepared by the dili- 
gent and exact J. P. Anderson, of the 
British Museum, was more complete in 
1888 than any other. 

VI. Emerson in Concord : A Memoir. 
By Edward Waldo Emerson. (Boston 
and New York, 1889 : Houghton, Mifflin 
& Co.) Like Mr. Cabot's work, this de- 
rives its chief value from the frequent 
citation of Emerson's words. It also 
gives agreeable and just views of his 
domestic and neighbourly relations. 
The opinions expressed are those of the 



138 BIBLIOGEAPHY 
editor, not always those of Emerson. 
It aims not to repeat much that Mr. 
Cabot had said. 

VII. Correspondence between John 
Sterling and E. W. Emerson. Edited 
by E. W. Emerson. (Boston and New 
York, 1897 : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) 
Interesting as a study in Emerson's 
friendships, but adding little to the Car- 
lyle volumes. 

VIII. Letters from E. W. Emerson 
to a Friend. Edited by C. E. Norton. 
(Boston and New York, 1899 : Hough- 
ton, Mifflin & Co.) The friend was 
S. G. Ward. The letters, mostly brief, 
begin in 1838 and end in 1853. They 
are invaluable for little touches of char- 
acter and certain sayings about art, poli- 
tics, and England not elsewhere found. 
Emerson's letters to Thoreau, printed 
in the Atlantic Monthly for 1893, are not 
in any volume. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 139 
Of other works should be consulted : — 

IX. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller 
Ossoli. (Boston, 1852 : Phillips, Samp- 
son & Co. Two volumes.) Contains 
many pages by Emerson and others re- 
lating to him and his friends. 

X. Sonnets and Canzonets. By A. 
Bronson Alcott. (Boston, 1882 : Bob- 
erts Brothers.) Published just before 
Emerson's last illness. Contains three 
sonnets describing him, one of which 
was read at his funeral. The other son- 
nets mostly describe friends of Emerson ; 
and a limited edition (out of print) in- 
cludes photographic heads of Emerson, 
Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth 
Peabody, Drs. Channing, Bartol, and 
Furness, Wendell Phillips, etc. 

XI. Literature. By Herman Grimm. 
(Boston, 1886 : Cupples, TJpham & Co.) 
The first and second essays in this 
volume, translated by Miss Sarah H. 



140 BIBLIOGKAPHY 
Adams, have Emerson for their subject. 
The first was published in 1861, th< 
second after Emerson's death. 

XII. Talks with Ealph Waldc 
Emerson. By 0. J. Woodbury. (New 
York, 1890: The Baker & Tayloi 
Company.) This is made up par f1 \ 
from actual talks and partly from 
Emerson's books or the report of 
others ; but it has more merit thar 
many elaborate works. 





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